STOP TRYING TO FEEL GOD

PRACTICE YOUR FAITH WALK
AND
YOU WILL EXPERIENCE GOD IN WAYS YOU NEVER DREAMED

Many times people forget that senses change, emotions change, and everything that they can experience with their five senses changes. Any time you allow your senses to dictate to you where you are with God, you have already lost the battle to Satan and his workers, called demons.

For instance, if someone says, “I felt like the Lord really heard by prayer that time.” Ever said that to yourself? The real truth is that most Christians feel like He does not hear them, MOST of the time, so you always end up having doubt in the back of your mind, ready to devour you at its first opportunity. Let me say it again, being caught or stuck in what you experience through your senses destroys the faith of many people. They are busy looking to the circumstances. NOT TO GOD. In the things of God, you have to learn to fly by instruments only. Airline pilots have to go through training as they learn how to fly, where they strictly learn how to fly a plane by “Instruments” ONLY. The flight instructors put the new pilots into “flight simulators,” and the new pilots are forced to go through practice flights in which they cannot see where they are going. They have to rely on their instruments ONLY.

Any pilot will be happy to share with you how his first sessions in one of those flight simulations affected him or her. He or she will tell you that the moment you cannot see anything, you loose all points of reference, like suddenly going blind while driving your car at high speed down the freeway. They have to LEARN HOW to trust, have confidence in, and believe that they will arrive safely at their destination, that the instruments will get them to where they need to go, safely.

Well, folks, we need to learn how to fly “by instruments.” The Bible, God’s Holy Word is your instruction manual. It gives you all of your readings, all of your settings. If you allow it, you will never “CRASH” in life. The old saying, “Seeing is believing” is not true in the things of God. That OLD SAYING needs to read like this, and we all need to remember this: “Believing is seeing,” for all Christians who are truly holy innocent children of God.

We simply must learn that what is UNSEEN is just as real as what we think we see with our physical eyes — that we believe is real. In 2 Corinthians 4:18, we are told:

” While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”

Remember, in the Gospel of John 4:24, Jesus Himself says: “God is a Spirit.” So we must remember, that unseen things are actually spiritual things, things that exist in the spirit realm, and YOU “look at” and receive them by using YOUR FAITH. When you use your faith, in essence, you transfer them from the spirit realm to the physical realm, and they change from being “unseen things” to things your five sense can experience.

Let us look at another example. There are many people who say that certain things, such as sickness and disease, do not exist. They say that it is a matter of mind, that there is problem with your mind. They say that if you can adjust your mind, change your thinking, that the sickness you think you see, physically will go away. THAT IS NOT TRUE. If anyone know whether that idea is true or not, God know. If there really is not any such thing as sickness and disease, then why does it say in 1 Peter 2:24 that by our Lord Jesus Christ’s strips were we healed?” Let us take a look at the Gospel of Matthew 8:17, “Himself (Jesus) took our infirmities, and bore our sickness?” Why does it say in Psalm 107:20 that, “He sent his Word, and healed them,” if there is nothing to be healed from. Remember, we are not asked to believe that what we experience here is NOT real. We think and experience it as VERY real. But God’s Word says to look beyond the physical experience of what is happening to you AND to walk by Faith and not by Sight. Our focus needs to be on God’s cure, God’ solution to it, which is written in His Word, and to then use your Faith to apply it to your situation or circumstance. If we stand unmoved, unshakable in our working of Faith, standing on God’s Word — THEN, the answer to our prayers come into manifestation into our physical lives and life experience.

The issue still is our own mouths, isn’t it? Have you, for instance, within the last couple of days even, allowed yourself to buy into the sickness or illness of others around you? Have you tried to compare YOUR symptoms with the symptoms of others to see if YOU ALSO had their illness or sickness in your own body or thinking? You can not, REPEAT cannot walk by FAITH and by SIGHT at the same time. You either are walking and using and living by FAITH — or by the SIGHT — of your physical eyes and the rest of your senses here in this life of ours. You cannot have it both ways at the same time. I you are busy verifying either your own sickness and illness or for the illness and sicknesses of other people, you are NOT motivating them to walk and live by Faith. How do we know this is true? Well, it is very simple folks. If you were walking by faith, you would have been asking them about how they had prayed for their healing. Did they pray in the right way? You might even perhaps ASK if they had seen a doctor to find out what was really wrong before they prayed. Even help them to BELIEVE they are healed until the healing is manifested into their lives. But one thing is for sure, you would not sit and discuss shared symptoms, how much they hurt, how much they disable you, etc.

Look folds, the word SIGHT makes us think about eyes. It then leads you to think about your visual perception, what you see with your eyes. If you talk about using your eyesight, you limit yourself to only 1/5th of your Body’s ability to feed information to you about the environment around you. What about the things we can hear, the things we can touch, etc. We need to learn how to walk by FAITH and not Sight when it comes to our prayers and our relationship with God our creator.

So now, let us go back and look at 2 Corinthians 4:18 once again, and re-read it using our FAITH formula.

“While we look not at the things (which are perceived by the senses) but at the things (which are not perceived by the senses) for (or because) the things which are perceived by the senses are temporal (temporary, subject to change); but the things which are not (perceived by the senses) are eternal.”

We can then go to 2 Corinthians 5:7 and read it the same way: “For we walk by Faith, not by (the senses).” And we can also do the same thing with Hebrews 11:1, to read this way: “Now Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (not perceived by the senses).” Let me say it once again. Learning to operate in and ON God’s Faith is just like learning to fly an airplane on INSTRUMENTS ONLY. Our emotions, our feelings all work to BLIND US as we are flying this airplane we call life. That is why, Paul tells us in Romans 10:17, “So then faith comes by hearing (i.e. hearing what?) and hearing by the word of God.” (i.e. Faith then, comes by hearing the Word of God.) But not even hearing it is enough is it??? You have to do what the Word of God tells you to do.

Let us change, just for a moment, so that we can understand what the scripture is really telling us. Let us word it as it is really speaking to us here: For we walk by Faith (i.e. the Word of God), not by the (our) senses. God’s Word then, becomes the evidence of things which are as yet, unseen, That is why we need to believe, UNTIL they are manifested into our lives.

Look folks, ONLY God’s Word working IN YOU, THROUGH YOU, can ever have any effect on the experience of your life here. It will change the circumstances of your life. Let us look again at Matthew 14: 22-31.

Peter does not TRY to walk on water, HE DOES WALK ON WATER. Peter asks Jesus if it really Him, can he, Peter, come to Him. Notice what Jesus says to Peter: “Come.” He gives Peter permission to walk on the water. It says that PETER DID IT. Folks, if you can take five steps on the water, you can take 5,000 steps on the water. But Peter falls prey, doesn’t he, just like we do so often. Peter takes his focus, his attention off of Jesus and looked at the Wind and the Waves. That is what SIGHT will do for you. Whenever we walk by our senses, it will cause you to walk in fear. When we allow FEAR to dwell in our minds, faith leaves us.

So here is Peter. He has taken his focus, his attention off Jesus and : “He, Peter began to sink, He therefore cried aloud saying, LORD save me.” in verse 31, we read: “And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him (i.e. Peter), and said to him, O THOU of little faith, WHY DID YOU DOUBT.” Peter doubted because he looked at the Wind and the Waves. The wind and the waves are in the realm of the physical world where our bodies are located. When Peter doubted the Word of God, his faith “WEAKENED,” and fear entered him. Whenever you hear the Word of God, faith will come to you. At this point we ALL have a choice. You can believe your senses (i.e. your bodies and all its symptoms) OR you can believe what God’s Word tells you. Remember, it is ONLY God’s Words working through you that will ever change the circumstances of your life.

When God Seems Far Away

Spiritual Wilderness Survival Guide

• Of all human experiences, having God in your life is potentially the most exciting, fulfilling and significant. Yet few, if any, of us are strangers to feeling deserted by God. We can feel empty and our every attempt to touch God can seem to end in stony silence or a divine scowl. Feeling cut off from God is sometimes nothing but a clever illusion instigated by our spiritual enemy, the diabolically cunning, supernatural Deceiver. Sometimes, however, it indicates a serious spiritual problem. Let’s briefly face the worst possibility and then we can indulge ourselves in some much needed reassurance and inspiration.

  Literally millions of people have gone through some sort of church act – perhaps going forward in a Christian meeting, or being baptized or confirmed – and yet have not a wisp of spiritual life. They can be convinced they are born again, look like believers, act like devout Christians, and yet have undergone no spiritual change.

  We can have unforgiven sin in our lives without realizing it. (It’s worth glancing at these Scriptures). This would cut us off from the holy God (Isaiah 59:1-2; Ps 66:18; Proverbs 28:9; Hebrews 7:26). If, for example, you held a grudge against someone, that unforgiveness would hinder your own forgiveness by God. (Scriptures) So whenever God seems distant, it is wise to pray along the lines of the psalmist, ‘Search me, O God, and know my heart . . . See if there be any offensive way in me’ (Psalm 139:23-4).

  There are excellent webpages to help you resolve these issues. If any of the following topics interest you, bookmark this webpage (or note its address), then consult the webpages and return here later:

  We should face and eliminate these possibilities before proceeding to other factors in feeling God’s presence. Gentle Omnipotence
  A man who had never in his life seen the sea was disappointed when he finally saw it. ‘I thought it would look bigger,’ he complained.

  There is always more to God than we can see. Did anyone expect God to be so foolish as to burn our eyes out when he appears, burst our eardrums when he speaks, crush us to dust when he touches? Since the Almighty must restrain himself whenever he relates to us, why should anyone be shocked if he chooses to be just a little gentler than we expected?

  You were literally made for God. It shouldn’t have to be an alien experience – something to fry your brains or drain you of adrenaline – to relate to the God who made you. Why shouldn’t prayer be as simple as breathing, as natural as a child chatting to its mother? You don’t have to wait until something is spooky or spectacular before concluding that God is in it.

  To the Jews, Jesus seemed too ordinary to be their Messiah. Could you be making a similar mistake in your expectations of what it would be like to have God in your life?

  Feelings versus reality
  An act of God might occasionally coincide with goosebumps or a warm gooey feeling, or some other emotion, but the moment we begin to expect inner feelings and spiritual reality to coincide, we are headed for disappointment.

  In both natural and supernatural matters, feelings and reality only sometimes line up. For instance, if someone handed you a million dollar check, you might feel no richer. One reason for feeling nothing could be that you think the check will bounce. You could throw away a million dollars simply because you don’t believe it’s real.

  You could also discard a unique opportunity with God just because you don’t believe it’s real. And that would be more tragic than tearing up a million dollars.

  God wants you to make it
  You are important to God. He is pleased with your search for him and with your genuine questioning. Nothing is more important than getting these matters sorted out. Focus on the fact that what God says is true. His Word guarantees that if you are willing to give up your sins and you ask forgiveness, trusting that Jesus died in your place, then God’s forgiveness is yours. And if you have forgiveness you have full access to God. What you feel is irrelevant. You might feel guilty, depressed, sick, or foolish, it makes no difference. What matters is objective fact, not feelings.

  God longs to save us. It cost him enormously (the death of Jesus) to make your forgiveness possible. He’s not going to squander that sacrifice. He has taken the initiative and what he has started he will finish. He will heed only a stubborn refusal to accept his offer of forgiveness. For anyone who even half wants God, the Lord will rush to forgive, because he is neither reluctant to save, nor so weak that he needs our help. If you have asked Jesus’ forgiveness, then you are forgiven, unless you are strongly aware that you are refusing to give God permission to take a particular sin from you.

  If you are seeking, you will find. That’s the divine promise. Just keep seeking. Although you might feel as if you are doing all the seeking, your hunger for God was seeded within you by God himself. Your spiritual longings are proof that God is actively working in your life (John 6:44; Philippians 2:13). On the surface, it might seem due to the influences of friends, circumstances, or whatever, but these are just means God is using.

  ‘Draw near to God and he will draw near to you’ promises Scripture (James 4:8). The divine commitment is not that you will feel that God is close, but that he will be close.

  Deception
  When you give your life to Christ, you gain the most wonderful and most powerful Friend in the entire universe. You also gain, however, a fearsome foe. Any friend of God’s is an enemy of the devil. Satan is nothing compared to God – not as smart, not as powerful; a total loser. He is, nevertheless, a superhumanly powerful, evil genius. With God on your side you have what it takes to defeat Satan every time, and the devil knows it. All he can do to Christians is to fool them into not using the spiritual power that Christ has given them. So he will do all he can to make you doubt God’s power and reality in your life by trying to manipulate your feelings.

  In short: you have an enemy. He’s an arch Deceiver. And he loves playing with your feelings.

  New Christian?
  There are reasons besides lack of faith why a person with a million dollar check could feel no different. He could be so stunned that his emotions have not yet caught up. Another reason is similar: nothing has happened yet. On paper he might be a millionaire, but he has not yet had a chance to spend a cent. So soon after the event there has been no change to his circumstances. Spiritually, too, unless you have been on the way for quite a while, you haven’t had a chance to start ‘cashing’ your new spiritual riches through prayer, experience and so on. It will take time for the results to become obvious.

  So it is perfectly normal for a new Christian to feel nothing at first. After a while you will receive more and more evidence that you really are in contact with Almighty God, but such awareness takes time. Like the growth of a tree, much of God’s work is not immediately obvious. It takes time to realize what has happened. Nevertheless, by faith you can know the miracle has commenced without having to wait until you can see it with your eyes.

  Regardless of how long we have been a Christian, if we spend just twenty minutes a day (less than one fiftieth of our waking hours) praying and thinking about the Lord, should we be surprised if the physical world seems fifty times more real to us than the spiritual realm?

  Moreover, all mature Christian have times when they feel nothing, because God wants us to learn to trust him, rather than trusting our emotions. He wants us to learn that the weather changes, people change, our feelings change, but he remains rock solid, totally true and dependable forever.

  God has promised to love you, be with you, forgive you, hear your prayers. On and on the promises go, but not once has he promised you will ‘feel’ anything. So place your faith in what God has promised (spelt out in black and white) not what he has not promised (elusive feelings).

  Spiritual highs
  You may feel very different when you go from a valley to a mountaintop experience, but little or nothing in you has actually changed. All that happens on a peak is that you can see further with your own eyes. You are temporarily less dependent upon a map or on what others tell you. (Even then, an accurate map or experienced advice is more reliable.) When you are highly conscious of God’s love for you, or you feel his presence, it’s not that God has suddenly become more loving (you can’t increase infinite love) nor that you’ve become more lovable, it’s just that from a spiritual mountaintop you see everyday reality more clearly. From a peak you can look back and see to your great surprise the wonderful progress you have made. You can see how when it seemed your Guide (the Holy Spirit) was taking you in circles you were actually skirting a dangerous area. Suddenly you see the wisdom in what had seemed aimless wanderings and useless diversions. You see how when it seemed your Guide had deserted you he must have somehow still been directing you because you took exactly the right route. You can look forward and see the exciting things you are headed for. Life seems far more exhilarating and makes so much more sense.

  You feel so different when you can see further. It’s like night compared to day. But when it’s dark nothing has actually changed, it’s just that you can’t see that nothing has changed! So it is when you move from times when you can see God’s love and goodness and closeness, to times when you can’t see them.

  Believing the unseeable and unfeelable
  Can you believe in something you cannot see or touch? Of course, you can! You do it all the time. You believe Abraham Lincoln existed. You have never seen or touched him. You simply believe in the integrity of those who claim to have researched the evidence that he existed. You believe such things, even though, unlike Jesus, these researchers don’t claim to be sinless. We know they are quite capable of lying and they have never confirmed anything by performing miracles, much less rising from the dead, yet we still don’t think of doubting countless thousands of historical events such as Lincoln’s assassination. You probably haven’t even met current heads of state. You merely believe those who claim they know their names and who claim that certain newspaper and television pictures are those of political leaders.

  We could say the same about scientific discoveries. Scientists do not squander their lives trying to replicate everyone else’s experiments. It would take them thousands of lifetimes to personally confirm every scientific fact they believe to be true. They simply trust the integrity of their fellow, fallible scientists and build on that foundation to make new discoveries.

  Someone wrote to me complaining that he could not be expected to believe the eyewitness reports in the gospels that Jesus conquered death. To have to rely on other people’s testimonies rather than on what his own eyes see is too much to ask, he claimed. And yet, like us, this man lives in a society in which it is impossible to function without trusting human testimony. You can’t even use a phone book without reliance upon the writings of fallible, less-than-saintly humans. And if the man on the other end of the phone line claims to be the person you want to speak to, how do you know he isn’t lying? You put your faith in human testimony hundreds of times each day. All of civilization hinges on it.

  The entire universe teeters on the dependability of God. Every time you do anything, you are unconsciously trusting the integrity of God. When you sit on a chair, for instance, you are trusting that God won’t suddenly change the laws of physics and let you crash to the floor. Christian faith is taking the faith we all have in the Creator’s dependability and simply extending that faith to include what he has put in black and white. Bible faith is just taking God at his word. It is choosing to believe that Jesus was not a quack – that he really was from God and that what he said is therefore trustworthy. And since, Jesus taught the reliability of Scripture and that God would reveal further truth to the disciples (who wrote the New Testament), trusting Jesus leads to trusting the entire Bible.

  If you have difficulty believing in Jesus, or the reliability of the Gospel accounts about him, there are many books that should set your mind at rest. I recommend Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol I by Josh McDowell. The critical point, however, is that Jesus and his word must be the foundation of your search for a relationship with God, not vague experiences.

• http://net-burst.net/tough/desert.htm

Gods word in times of trouble

God’s Word to us when we’re on the ragged edge of reality: Relax.

• Psalm 46:10 says to “Be still,” which literally means relax. It means to “let your arms down to your side”—to be vulnerable to God.
• God also says to “know that I am God.” He calls for a cognitive response.
  
  
• We cease striving not because we know how it’s going to work out, but because we know the God who will work it out.

What can we know about God that we can hang on to no matter how dark it gets?

• God is actively busy as our protector, providing strength and help. He never lets anything into our lives that he can’t turn to glory and our good.
• God won’t leave you in the ditch. He stayed with Joseph even when Potiphar sentenced him to prison.
• God’s reputation rides on our problems; he’ll resolve our problems to his glory.
  -Illustration: King Jehoshaphat faced the military threat of three nations, and turned to God for help. God’s answer to him through the prophet Jahaziel: “The battle is not yours. It is the Lord’s.”

What are some applications from Psalm 46?

• Instead of being consumed by the problem, we should turn our face to the Lord.
• We should embrace God, believing he’ll be our refuge, that he’ll be exalted.
• Like Job, we should be able to say, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.”

Finding the true religion

I came across this article while searching the web. Although it relates to leaving the Jehovahs Witnesses, the principles and problems encountered ring true for all of us.

To Whom Shall We Go?

Ex-Witnesses, and Witnesses with grave doubts about the Society, often ask the question, “If the Witnesses aren’t the true religion, what is?”

Some people who have disconnected from the Society refrain from asking this question. They adopt the uncomfortable position that the Witnesses are indeed the True Religion, but due to some inherent flaw in themselves they can not participate. These people understandably suffer from feelings of guilt and inadequacy. They may continue to identify themselves as “inactive Witnesses” rather than “ex-Witnesses”, even if they’ve only attended a few meetings in the past year. They are forever on the verge of leaving. In a way, their difficult situation is similar to the story of the donkey who was positioned exactly halfway between two stacks of hay: he couldn’t make up his mind which way to go, and starved. In much the same way, these people end up being spiritually hungry, never able to choose or find a viable source of spiritual nourishment.

Other ex-Witnesses reject the Watchtower Society outright, but believe that they must now seek out the real True Religion. Sometimes such people jump aboard the first religion that resembles the Witnesses — usually fundamentalist in nature — and become “born again”. Some ex-Witnesses search for a while, become frustrated, and give up on religion altogether. Such people may become atheists or agnostics.

A few ex-Witnesses may actively seek out a religion that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the one they left. They may find satisifaction in following a non-Western way of thinking, such as Buddhism, Daoism or Hinduism. A few others may embrace New Age religions which are hybrids of Christianity, Eastern mysticism, and (in some cases) shrewd marketing.

Randomly Biased Choices

Nobody picks a religion completely at random, but random effects do affect our choice. For example, if you lived next door to a Lutheran church, you would be slightly more likely to become a Lutheran than to join a church which required you to drive for two hours to get to meetings.

Your choice can be influenced by your parents and forebears. Their influence is echoed in the famous song, “Gimme That Old Time Religion”, which looks far into the past as it declares, “If it was good enough for Moses, it’s good enough for me.” Those who came before certainly have an effect on those who come after. If your parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses, it’s unlikely that you’ll start out in some other religion.

Your choice is also based on what you’ve heard — particularly from people you respect. Such people are “giving a good witness” for their particular belief system.

One of the strongest influences on your choice of religion is culture. It is rare for people raised in an Islamic country to suddenly become Christians. Such people are seldom exposed to the message of Christianity. Also, in countries where Islam is fundamentalist, a potential Christian would have to face social stigma. As for people growing up in Communist China, their chances of encountering Western ideas about religion are extremely limited.

To turn things around a bit, people in Western countries tend to have a negative view of Islam, for political reasons. They also do not have access to expressions of Eastern religions that have been tailored to fit the West. For example, someone who wishes to learn about Zen Buddhism is frequently required to adopt Japanese ways which are not really integral to the message of Zen. These Japanese affectations can make the philosophy inaccessible.

Our choice of religion can be biased and constrained in many ways.

Nonsense Versus Benefits

Some people maintain that there is no true religion because (they say) religion is a fundamentally nonsensical idea. This is the position taken by some (but by no means all) evolutionists. One notorious example is Richard Dawkins (author of the ground-breaking book “The Selfish Gene”). He seems to have a rather mechanistic view of things, and maintains that religion is the intellectual equivalent of a virus.

As such, a religion would be merely another process trying to survive. By reducing the question of religion in this way, we focus solely on the benefits of religion to a group of people (and the religion itself), but say nothing about “truth”. This is not as bad as it may sound.

If we accept the view taken by people like Dawkins, we are compelled to shift the emphasis from “truth” to “utility” (i.e. benefits). That is to say, we are assuming that for a religion to survive, it must provide benefits to its adherents. As such, a religion may be nonsensical (or incomprehensible) but its survival proves that it is not useless.

Given this point of view, we might judge a religion subjectively, asking, “Does it make me happy?” or objectively: “Does it satisfy a large number of people?”

What is Truth?

Is it possible for a religion that is utterly false to provide actual benefits? That depends on what you mean by “false”. A religion’s doctrines may not stand up well to its critics, but its rituals and social milieu may address basic human needs. The specific doctrines may not withstand scrutiny, but since they reinforce the social milieu, they gain a measure of validity. The believers may not be interested in a deep analysis of their basic beliefs, because they can plainly see that it “delivers the goods”. If we argue this point, we may find ourselves in the absurd position of telling somebody, “You only think you’re happy!”

Since the religion has shown that its doctrines can successfully strike a resonant chord in its members, it can be considered at least “relatively true” even if it can’t be considered “absolutely true”. That is to say, the basic machinery of the religion produces positive results, so it must accurately reflect something about its members.

What is True About “The Truth”?

Ex-Witnesses, since they were once Witnesses, may have the idea that a religion must be true in the absolute sense. Indeed, it takes some ex-Witnesses a long time to stop referring to their former religion as “The Truth”.

Yet the Watchtower Society’s “New Light” doctrine is based on the idea that even the Society isn’t infallible. Despite falling short of perfection, the Society has provided many people with a satisfactory religious experience. They must be doing some things right: several million people are perfectly happy to be Jehovah’s Witnesses.

What is “true” about the Witnesses? For one thing, it is true that people like to have a sense of being one of the elect few, having a sense of certainty, and delving deeply into mysteries that baffle others. Whether or not Witness teachings are true in the absolute sense does not change the fact that Witnesses gain the benefits just mentioned — and many more, besides.

A Desperate Search

Ex-Witnesses have to deal with the shock of finding out that the religion they thought was True is, in fact, just another religion with a particular set of benefits and flaws.

Some ex-Witnesses acquire a compelling urge to find the One True Religion — the one that knows all and reveals all. Even after they leave the Witnesses (which they once thought was nearly perfect), they may retain the feeling that the ideal religion is out there — if only they could find it.

The Challenge of Change

Most mainstream religions (specifically, those not centred around a single person) are run by people (usually men) who are fine, upstanding folks with motives that are basically good and pure. That may not have been the case in earlier times, but what with the separation of church and state, plus the eagle eye of the media, a religion wastes less energy and takes less risk by running a clean operation.

The trouble is, no person (or group of people) can know everything. They can not fathom every subtle nuance of every possible doctrine. For this reason religions hold councils, or gatherings, meetings of a governing body, or convocations of elders. Matters that were previously cast in stone must be examined from time to time — and sometimes changed. The Watchtower Society calls this “New Light”. Other religions may call it something else. To quote a popular saying, they seek “Progress, not Perfection”.

All religions have to progress to keep pace with the secular world. That is to say, religions in the modern world are constantly subjected to tests of their interpretations. For example, there once was a time when people thought that lightning was a sign of God’s disapproval. This is rather hard to square away with the easily observed fact that lightning prefers hitting the tallest object in the area — which is frequently the steeple of a church! (Well, perhaps ardent Witnesses wouldn’t find that so surprising…)

A religion that tries to resist the march of science or fashions in liberal thinking must expend more and more energy to hold back the tide of contrary ideas. Keeping this in mind, even the staid Catholic church has recently admitted that evolution is more than “just a theory”. (Hardly a ringing endorsement, but nevertheless a significant change.)

So Who’s Perfect?

There is no religion that has never made a mistake, because there is no religion run by perfect people. So it is, and so it has been. This is seen in the words of the Old Testament prophets, who frequently pointed out the failings of the Israelites and (in some cases) their rulers.

Of course, some religions try to withstand the battering-ram of science and — to some extent — try to seem “perfect”. Such religions must expend enormous energy trying to keep their members in line with the current “understanding”. The more energy a religion must expend in this task, the more totalitarian it must become. In such cases, difficult questions and open inquiry are not encouraged. Access to information must be controlled, or at least channeled. Ex-Witnesses know this all too well. While the Society does not “blacklist” specific books and web sites, Witnesses implicitly know that they should not read anything critical written by an ex-Witness. Such writings are condemned under the general banner of apostate propaganda.

Who Owns You?

We’ve already established that no religion is perfect. So how do you choose which one to follow? Is that a fair question?

There is no rule written across the sky in blazing letters which says that you have to pick a particular religion and condemn all the others. Perhaps, if somebody asks you, “What religion do you belong to?” you could reply, “None. But why don’t you ask me what my religion is?”

What your religion is doesn’t have to have a name. You can decide (to the best of your ability) what constitutes your religion. You might believe, for example, that “You should love your neighbour as yourself”. That single statement would be a solid foundation for your personal religion — and quite frankly it wouldn’t be an easy rule to follow faithfully.

There’s nothing wrong with going to a Catholic mass in the morning, a rollicking Evangelical meeting in the afternoon, and a meditation center in the evening. There is something good about all three. The question is: are you going to let one group “own” you? To put it another way: do you really want to be in a position where you are given a list of beliefs that you must accept to avoid censure?

A Slice of Truth

If you had been raised as a Presbyterian, you might still be one. You might find that it suits your needs, and you’re not overly concerned about the small details. It gives you a taste of the divine, along with a social setting. There’s nothing wrong with that.

However, if you have rejected the Jehovah’s Witnesses, you are likely to probe more deeply into matters. You already know what it is like to believe something is “The Truth” when in fact it is only a small slice of the truth, adorned with abstruse chronologies and myriad rules.

Applying What You’ve Learned

You may choose a particular church as your “home base” — preferably one without a list of absolute doctrines that you can’t fully accept. But since you’ve learned (the hard way) just how easily our understanding can be confused and undermined, you have a skill that few people acquire: you have the ability to say, “Oh, really?” You have dared to ask difficult questions, and you have dared to listen for the answers.

Sometimes, though, the answer to a difficult question is silence. This is hard to take, and this is where everybody — even atheists — need faith. We need to believe that the silence will eventually be broken. Maybe not in our lifetime, but surely at some time.

As you pursue the answers to your questions, don’t be frightened by occasional silence. It is preferable to the noise and flash with which many religions fill in the unknown areas. True religion is not a fireworks exhibition.

We dare not to know, in order that one day we can truly know.

The Religious Process

You are responsible for finding your own salvation, however you define that term. You can benefit from the input of wise men and (hopefully) reject the blathering of fools. But ultimately, you are the one who chooses. It is up to you — and only you — to pick for yourself the wise course of action.

True religion is not a single choice. It is a never-ending series of choices — sometimes because we’ve made mistakes, and sometimes because we’ve entered new territory. Religion in general is about Purpose, but true religion is also about flexibility. To be part of true religion is to be teachable, and that requires both honesty and humility.

True religion lurks everywhere. It’s around every corner. Wherever there are people who are earnestly searching for answers, who are willing to give up cherished notions if necessary — there you will find true religion.

True religion resides in each of us. The challenge is to set it free.

 http://members.aol.com/beyondjw/truth.htm

Does God Love me 4

******************************************************************************To God, You Are Special

God’s smile is upon you. You light up his face
as much as anyone has ever lit up a lover’s face.

(This important webpage is also available in French, Danish, and Afrikaans)

Most of us imagine that in God’s eyes we are just one of millions.
We know most people don’t think we are important and so we assume
God thinks of us in a similar way. But then, again, God is not like
‘most people.’ We feel that God has favorites and we think we’re a fair
way down the list, but we are about to see this is one way where feelings
do not correspond to reality. To God, you are special.

Four reasons why God favors no one over you

1. God’s Son shed his last drop of blood for you. God loves you with his whole heart. He loves you with every speck of his enormous love. That means no matter how much he loves others, he couldn’t possibly love anyone else more than he loves you.

A woman wrote about the above paragraph:

• I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

I had wanted to say, “God loves me with his whole heart? Come off it! It’s a wonder he loves me at all! Grantley, you exaggerate too much!” But the Lord silenced me with John 17:23:
I can’t get round it; I can’t burrow under it or climb over it. So the only thing I can do is go through it, absorbing it as I go. Christ is in me – and God loves me as much as he loves Christ. And no way can God’s love for Christ be half-hearted. I went to sleep snuggling into that verse last night.

Scripture makes no promise that you will always feel loved, nor that circumstances will always make it obvious that you are loved. God simply promises that you are loved. No suffering or tragedy will ever separate you from God’s love (Romans 8:35-39). A snap-shot in time proves nothing. Only eternity’s movies can adequately portray the infinitude of God’s love for you.

The more you love someone the more important that person is to you. So the fact that God loves you with his whole heart means you are more important to God than you could ever imagine.

2. Before God forgave us we were all spiritually dead. Scripture affirms that every person on this planet was dead in their sin. You can’t get any deader than dead. God couldn’t say, I prefer her because she’s a little less dead than him.

But through Christ we can be forgiven. When God looks at a forgiven person, he can’t find one sin. When you are forgiven, God can’t find a person on the entire planet, more forgiven than you.

So without Christ we were all equally dead in our sin and in Christ we are all equally forgiven.

3. God is all-powerful. That means he doesn’t need some people more than others.

If God could only use young people, or strong people, or rich people, or famous people, or educated people, then God must be so weak that he needs human strength; so poor that he needs us to give him a few dollars; so foolish that he needs human education.

4. The Lord loves using small and seemingly unimportant things. 1 Corinthians 1:26 says, ‘Look at what you were before God called you. Not many of you were wise by human standards. Not many of you had great influence. Not many of you came from important families. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and he chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose what this world thinks is unimportant and what this world looks down on and thinks is nothing in order to bring to nothing what the world thinks is important. God did this,’ the Bible continues, ‘so that no one could boast in his presence.’

In the Bible, the book of Jonah seems small and insignificant. It’s only 2-3 pages long. I often feel like that: small and insignificant. I have often felt so useless that I would have committed suicide if I wasn’t worried about having to face God afterwards. But the Bible would be very much poorer without this tiny book. And the Kingdom of God would be much poorer without you. In this tiny book we see God using a storm, a whale, a heartless, rebellious, moody man, a plant, and a grub. Are you less gifted than a grub? Then God can do mighty things through you. If God could use a storm and a plant and a grub, God is smart enough to use you. God is so powerful he can use anything to do his work.

No Christian is too old, too poor, too uneducated, too stupid, too sick to be gloriously used of God. We can’t explore this in depth here. For just one aspect of this, see Never too old for God.

Do you believe there is nothing God cannot do? Do you believe God could bring a dead person back to life? Do you believe God could bring a dead person back to life through your prayers? Those words ‘through your prayers’ don’t suddenly make God weak. Do you believe God can save thousands of souls? Then you must also believe God can save thousands of souls through you.

Either God can do the impossible through you, or he isn’t God.

Keep telling yourself, ‘There is nothing God cannot do through me.’

Heaven stands on tip toe waiting to see the astounding things you will achieve for the glory of God.

No one is more important to God than you are: Bible proofs

In the book of Galatians 2:6-9, Paul speaks of Peter, James and John. If anyone could claim to be have a special place in God’s heart it was these men. When Jesus walked this planet they seemed his closest friends. Later they were called the pillars of the church. Without pillars the whole building collapses. Yet Paul wrote of these men, ‘whatever they were, it makes no difference to me; God shows personal favoritism to no one.’ Paul was speaking about Peter, the man honored by millions as the first pope. Even his shadow healed people. Paul was speaking about the leaders of the church, the greatest saints, when divinely inspired to write, ‘whatever they were, it makes no difference to me; God shows personal favoritism to no one.’ Tell yourself, ‘The Bible says I am as important to God as Peter, James and John.’

One day the disciples told Jesus that his mother wanted to speak with him. Jesus replied, ‘Who is my mother? Anyone who does God’s will is my mother’ (Luke 8:20-21).

So anyone who obeys God has as much right to speak with Jesus, as Mary has. Anyone who does God’s will has the same place in Jesus’ heart as his own mother.

Another time when Jesus was preaching, a woman shouted, ‘Blessed is the woman who gave you birth.’ Yet instead of agreeing with her, Jesus said Blessed rather is the person who obeys God (Luke 11:27-28).

Jesus was born only once. So only one woman could have the privilege of giving birth to the Messiah. That was Mary’s unique blessing. But spiritually, we are all equally blessed. In Ephesians 1:3 the Bible says each of us have been lavished every spiritual blessing. How could it be otherwise? If Christ died (ie gave his all) for sinners, what would he possibly withhold from them now that they are cleansed and made God’s precious children? As Scripture points out, since you are so dear to God that he gave his only Son for you – the most costly gift in the universe – there can be nothing he won’t give you (Romans 8:32, see also 1 Corinthians 3:21-22).

Tell yourself, ‘I am as spiritually blessed as anyone.’

You have a special place in God’s heart

From the age of four, I loved helping my grandpa lay cement paths. Almost anyone could do a better job than a little child, but that was irrelevant. I was irreplaceable. I had a special place in grandpa’s heart.

And you have a special place in God’s heart. To him you are irreplaceable. The Almighty needs the help of no one. Yet the Father’s joy could never be complete without your contribution.

My grandpa wanted me to share in his work. Not because he needed me, but because I was special to him. And God wants you to share in his work. Think about that for a minute – God’s work is the most important work in the universe. God has something of divine importance; something of eternal significance that he wants you to help him with. Wow! You are important!

To God, you are special. I used to think yeah, yeah God loves me, but he loves everyone. To him I’m just one of millions of Christians. God has his favorites and I’m not one of them. I thought I was being humble thinking this way. But what I was really doing was accusing God of imperfect love. In fact, I was calling God a liar. God says he loves you. So to believe that you are unimportant to God is to believe that God is a liar. There is nothing humble about calling the holy Lord a liar! It’s sin.

God is the most important person in the universe. So if you are important to him, you are important! There is nothing humble about telling the all-wise God that he’s wrong. This is serious.

How dare I go up to the glorious Lord who shed his life’s blood for me and tell him, ‘I’m not special to you.’ Dare I go to the cross where I deserved to hang, look into my Savior’s bleeding face, and accuse him of loving others more? He died for me! What more dare I demand he do before I accept the fact that I’m special to him! I need to feel as bad about that sin as if I were guilty of murder.

It’s said that a pirate killed a man. He was so horrified by what he had done that he couldn’t sleep properly for weeks. But he kept killing. He got to the point where he could kill a man, use the corpse as a pillow and sleep soundly all night. We are like that. We have committed the sin of wrong thinking so often that our consciences have become as hard as concrete. For other sins our consciences have might still be soft but to the sin of doubt and small thinking, we are hardened.

Lepers lose fingers, toes, sometimes noses. It was always thought the disease did this. But a brilliant medical missionary began to question this. Dr Paul Brand noticed that lepers would go to bed whole and wake up without a finger. No one could ever find a trace of the missing finger. He eventually discovered that the fingers were being chewed off and carried away by rats! However could this happen? It’s because lepers lose feeling. And that’s our problem. We have lost feeling in part of our conscience. And then the devil – that fat rat – begins to chew us and instead of shooing him away, we don’t even realize what he’s doing. We desperately need God to make our consciences sensitive.

The crunch

We now come to the most crucial part of this message. This message could give you a boost for a few days, then fade and ultimately achieve nothing. Or it could be the turning point in your life, making you the powerful force in the kingdom of God that you were created to be.

It’s frightening to consider how much this world misses out when any Christian thinks he or she is not special to God. There’s no Christian who cannot be used of God to win thousands of souls, should the Lord so chose. There’s no Christian who can’t be used to change the course of human history. But while we hold on to the sin of small thinking, it won’t happen. This is serious – more serious than any of us can imagine. To rid ourselves of this sin will probably cost us enormously, but for us to be freed from sin cost Christ far more.

For us to give up the sin of small thinking is as hard as it is for an alcoholic to permanently give up drink. We need a gigantic miracle in our personal lives. It begins by admitting that we are addicted to the serious sin of not seeing ourselves and our possibilities as God sees them. We must hate this sin. We must admit that we are such a slave to this sin that the only way we can be freed is by a divine miracle.

I suggest the following prayer. Pray any part of it that you feel you can agree with.

Lord in your mercy begin to open my mind and my conscience to the seriousness of my sin. I have sinned in thinking you have favorites. I have sinned by thinking I’m not important to you. I have sinned by thinking you don’t want to use me to do amazing things of eternal significance for your glory. My addiction to small thinking has hurt you and done enormous damage. Through Jesus’ shed blood, I beg your forgiveness. I ask for total deliverance from my addiction. I now declare that you want to do mighty things through me. I refuse to tolerate any lesser thought. And I look to you for divine strength to forever defeat such sinful thinking. Lord, don’t let me ever again commit this sin without feeling your strong displeasure. No matter what it costs me, be glorified in my life.

Maintaining the victory

For very many years I have been constantly tempted to feel useless. I wrote a book giving all the reasons why every one of us can achieve great things for God and I had to keep reading that book every day, week after week, year after year. Whenever I stopped reading it for a few days I would slip back into depression again.

So I make no apologies for expecting that you will need to hold on to the truths in this message and read it over and over for maximum benefit. They are important truths that the devil tries with all his power to make us forget. We must hold on to them as if our very life depended upon it. In fact, it can be more important than life itself. Other people’s eternal destinies could depend upon whether we grasp these truths and live them. The Lord wants to make you a powerful force in the kingdom of God.

Your need, however, is too chronic for any self-help technique to deliver you from your addiction. You must daily ask the Lord to re-sensitize your conscience. The Lord’s prayer – ‘give us this day our daily bread . . . lead us not into temptation’ – proves our need to daily bring to God our need for divine help in conquering temptation. Without this we will be drawn into a false and dangerous delusion that our dependence upon God is less than absolute. ‘Let anyone who thinks he stands,’ warns Scripture, ‘take heed lest he fall’ (1 Corinthians 10:12). However, your divine Helper, the Holy Spirit, dwells inside you, wherever you go, 24 hours a day. It’s tragically easy to slip back into old habits and hardly notice it. Daily look to him to set off the alarm bells whenever you begin to slip back. You then have divine protection.

Negative thoughts will still come but, once exposed, you can repel them with the same disgust as you would a blood-sucking leech. These filthy invaders from the sewers of hell are not part of you. We can’t think of nothing, nor can we think of two things at once, so the best way to eject wrong thoughts is to seize the opposite thought, ideally, a statement you know to be true because it’s in the Word of God. Cling to it like a non-swimmer holding a life rope in swirling waters. Thrash the devil by using every approach of an invader as a cue to throw a praise party in your mind, exalting in the fact that the truth (reality) is the exact opposite of the lie trying to invade you. This shines a floodlight on low life that can survive only in darkness. Resist the devil and he will flee (James 4:7). He’ll try to sneak back later, but as you daily look to the Lord you will live in victory.

Appendix: why the sin of unbelief is so addictive

This section details some of the reasons why I became addicted to wrong thinking. The cause of your own addiction will not necessarily be the same, but it is still helpful to be alerted to the dangers.

I used to sometimes put myself down in the hope that whoever I was speaking to would take pity on me and give me an ego boost. I was oblivious to how pathetic such behavior is until one day I met someone who refused to play my game. Instead of boosting me, all she would do was rebuke me and accuse me of sin for being negative about myself. I was most annoyed until I began to see myself more accurately. By making myself dependent upon ego boosts from other people I had made myself frighteningly vulnerable. I was expecting others to do something that was my responsibility. Moreover, my actions proved that human praise meant more to me than the divine approval I already had. And every time I got the flattery I was seeking, I was being rewarded for my put downs, thus increasing my addiction.

If the success of achieving a goal is sweet, to be significantly more successful than I had dared dream is exceedingly delicious. The simplest way of ensuring a repeat of this highly addictive thrill is to convince myself I will do poorly. The exhilaration I get when I exceed my low expectations is rich reward for having a low view of my God-given potential. I was grieving God, defaming his name and committing the sin of unbelief – deliberately lowering my faith – in the (sometimes unconscious) hope of experiencing a high.

And although I knew faith pleases God, I also knew that taking a faith step is scary. It’s easier to take the lazy, cowardly way out.

Making wise-cracks at my own expense was another trap. Every time someone laughed, I got my reward, but every such wise-crack chiseled negative attitudes a little deeper into my mind. I was baiting my own trap.

Addictions have their momentary pleasures. In the end, however, they are a curse keeping us from the full and exciting and God-glorifying life we were created for. As we daily look to Jesus, however, the curse will be broken.

http://net-burst.net/hope/special.htm

Does God Love me 3

Question: Does God love me?

Did you know a team of scientists recently concluded there are 10 times more stars in the night sky than grains of sand in the world’s deserts and beaches? According to astronomers, there are 70 thousand million million million stars. That’s a seven followed by 22 zeros.

What can we learn from something like this? We can learn the awesome nature of God for one! We can also learn something about God’s love for each and every one of us.

The Bible tells us God, so wonderful and powerful there is absolutely nothing He can’t do, knows the precise number of stars in the heavens and can call them all by their names! He can do that because He is intimate with each and every one of them. With His hands, he formed each and every one of them. Isn’t that simply amazing?

• Psalms 147:4-5: He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names. Great is our Lord, and of great power: his understanding is infinite.

God, who formed all the stars of heaven, knows when a sparrow falls from the sky. He loves all His creation. He loves you too! You are worth more than many sparrows to God!

• Matthew 10:29-31: Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.

From the moment you were conceived in the womb, God the Father, Master of the universe, the Creator of 70 thousand million million million stars, has known you and cared for you. Much like He created the stars, His hands knitted you together in your mother’s womb.

• Psalms 139:13-16: For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.

How much time does God spend thinking of you?

How much do you mean to God? More than you probably have ever realized! If you were impressed to learn God has made more stars than the sands of the sea, you are about to be floored to discover how much time He spends thinking of you!

Psalms 139:17-18: How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand:

We spend very little time thinking of God yet He spends an infinite amount of His time thinking about us.

The next time you wonder how much God loves you, go to the ocean, pick up a handful of sand, and start counting the grains. He loves you THAT much!

The next time you find yourself feeling God doesn’t love you, walk outside on a clear night beneath a sea of stars and start counting. He loves you THAT much!

God loves you!

http://www.rapturealert.com/doesgodlovemefaq.html

Does God love me?

Does God love me?

Does God love me? After all, there are billions of people on this planet, many with problems far worse than mine. Why would God care about my little problems? God cares for all of His creation. The Bible says that God even cares for sparrows, one of the most numerous species of birds on earth. Despite their number, the Bible says that God knows when each one of them dies. How much more would He care for individual human beings, who He made in His image and likeness?

Does God love me? I’ve done a lot of bad things. I don’t deserve God’s love. The Bible says that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. The Bible also says that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life (John 3:16, KJV). Who did God love? God loved the world. The world includes every human being that ever lived and would ever live on this planet. Jesus Christ died because He loves the people of the world and does not want any to spend their life on earth, or their eternal life, apart from Him.

Jesus loved the men who placed a crown of thorns upon His head and spat upon Him and mocked Him. Jesus loved the men who whipped Him and beat Him beyond human recognition. Jesus loved those who saw Him carrying the cross up Golgotha’s mountain and jeered at Him and cursed Him. He even loved those who nailed His hands and feet to the cross and gave Him vinegar, instead of water, when He said that He was thirsty.

The evidence that Jesus loved His tormenters is that He never struck or cursed them. He never tried to defend Himself, though He was innocent and did not deserve to die. He could have called legions of angels to rescue Him, but He didn’t. Because He is God incarnate, He could have destroyed every one of them without lifting a finger, but He didn’t. He endured the torture and humiliation, at the hands of evil people, because He loved them and loves mankind. He knew that His death was the only way that humanity would have a chance to be reconciled to God and to have a personal relationship with Him.

Does God love me? You bet! The Bible says that God knows the number of hairs on your head. It says that God knows your thought afar off (from His heavenly abode) and is intimately acquainted with all of your ways. He knew you before you were formed in your mother’s womb. Why would God take so much interest in you if He didn’t love you?

http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/does-god-love-me-faq.htm

If God Loves Everyone, Where does that leave me?

The language we use in modern Christianity to speak about God and his love for us often fails to do justice to the special ways in which he relates to us as individuals. I first became convinced of this when a woman spoke with me following a seminar. For much of her life, Nancy had been reluctant to commit herself to God, even though she believed some of the tenets of Christian doctrine.

She summed up her misgivings in an unforgettable statement: “For a long time I had no doubt that God loved me, but it made no difference to me–for the fact is that God loves everyone. And if God loves everybody, what’s so special about the fact that he loves me?”

Although I had never heard it expressed this way before, I realized immediately that Nancy had her point. Our manner of speaking about God can imply that there is no individuality in a relationship with him. We talk of him loving everyone, and loving them equally, impartially, the same way. While to one person this speaks of great security in a relationship with God, to another it speaks of a loss of distinctiveness.

We long for distinctiveness as human creatures, probably more than anything. We each want to know that we are originals and not copies. We crave assurance that we are somehow unique among the mass of humanity, that there is justification to our existence.

The desire for distinctiveness touches us on two levels. We want to know that our work and accomplishment are unique, that we can contribute something to human life which no one else can. But we also long for distinctiveness within relationships. Much of the thrill of being loved and cherished by someone is the sense of being special that goes along with it. You know you’re accepted for whom you are and esteemed in a way that is different from that person’s affection for anyone else.

Yet if God loves everyone in an equal, unbiased fashion, how can there be anything distinctive about a relationship with him? What’s so novel about receiving his love? What possibility for creative accomplishment is there in living for him? You’re simply one of the mass, responding to a vast cosmic love force.

Nancy had put her finger on why it is that some people, though convinced that a loving God exists–perhaps even persuaded he has revealed himself in Christ–still fail to take the step of giving their life to him. It would mean losing their individuality–entering a life of clonely conformity with others who have joined the Christian club.

She had also singled out why some believers actually bail out of their Christian walk. The chaplain of a large Christian university agreed with me that the major reason some students on Christian campuses abandon their faith is that they see nothing distinctive about being a Christian. Unlike the secular campus–where one may enjoy a cherished sense of rebellion by being a Christian–everyone around them is a Christian, responding to a God who loves them identically and has similar intentions for their lives. Individuality, they conclude, can only be found outside of a relationship with God.

From Despair to Distinction

But Nancy, fortunately, had come to see God in a more creative fashion than this. “I’ve finally come to realize that God does love me differently from any other person,” she continued. “I don’t mean that he loves me any more than anyone else, only distinctively. There is a portion of his love that is meant for me and for me alone.” She went on to explain that this discovery had been the turning point, allowing her to come into a meaningful relationship with God.

The thought of God’s love being distinctive was revolutionary to me. But the more I’ve reflected on it, the more I’ve become convinced that this is exactly the outlook Scripture presents. God is pictured as one who loves each person equally, perfectly, completely–yet still in a fashion unique to that individual. There is a measure of his love meant for each of us alone.

On five occasions in his gospel, for instance, John refers to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved (Jn 13:23, 19:26, 20:2, 21:7, 21:20). He clearly didn’t mean that Jesus loved him more than anyone else. He notes that Jesus loved Mary, Martha and Lazarus (Jn 11:5, 36), and all of his disciples (Jn 13:1). In his most far-reaching statements John quotes Jesus as saying that anyone who follows him will be loved by God (Jn 14:21), and that God through Christ loves the world (Jn 3:16).

Why, then, did John call himself the disciple whom Jesus loved? I believe he meant that Jesus’ love for him, while not exclusive, nor greater than his love for anyone else, was distinctive. Christ loved him in a way unique from his affection for any other person!

John would surely have thought it appropriate for Peter or any other disciple to make this same claim. By the same token, it’s one that each of us who follows Christ can make for ourselves. The remarkable freedom John felt, in referring to himself in this fashion, suggests that we should think of ourselves in this way. It is not egotistical to do so, but vital to our self-image as Christians.

THE UNIVERSE!

Transcript from a public discourse

The whole thing is as bizarre as it can be.
Think about space, if you took God away, what is left?
Is there anything out there left?
Is there space?
Is it dark?
Is it light?
Then what is it then?

We think if we take away the creation you have black, cold, space.  Three things in space, it’s black, dark and very cold, absolute zero and not a lot of room to do it in.
It’s interesting that most scientist don’t believe that space is eternal.  They believe it came into existence with a big bang and time.  Hence we have the space, time and matter continuum.  All started at the same time.

So I say that God is perfect, that’s why He doesn’t change now and Christ doesn’t change.  But did He ever?  Because I have to answer a question.  Where did God get patience?

[Someone ask the  question: where did He learn obedience?]
I think He learned obedience before He was born and reduced down to a man and so on and so forth.
Left to His own we know what He could accomplish- nothing.  He said so, “I can of mine own self do nothing:”   (John 5:30).  Because He had the spirit without measure, He could not sin.  Now Christ had to sweat bullets to do it, but it was still God doing it.

God puts us in the same situation, we have to live our lives.  You may say, well I’ll just kill myself.  Not unless God wants you to, you can’t kill yourself if God doesn’t want you to.  Everybody that ever killed themselves, it was after God said, ok, now you are going to kill yourself.
He is in control of EVERTHING, through circumstances.  He doesn’t make anyone kill themselves against their will, no.  But He puts them into situations where they can’t tolerate life anymore and their own will becomes, I want to kill myself.

[Someone ask the question: is that why Christ was always in prayer?]
Well yes, it’s like the old saying; act like it all depends on you and pray like it all depends on God.  That’s the way you should live your life.   He could not help but pray.
What appears to be contradictions are not contradictions, when you have a higher spiritual understanding of what it’s talking about.
Let me show you a perfect example and it sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not.

Phi 2:12  “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”

Doesn’t that contradict this whole thing, we’re saved by grace and not of works?  And now we’re to work out our own salvation?  What is that?  How do you explain that?  “ Of Myself I can do nothing…” (John 5:30),  and he said YOU can do nothing, He said to the apostles.  Then Paul says “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”  Well it does sound like a contradiction.  Read the next verse, He tells us why.  ‘For,’ now that word always means ‘because,’ it’s another word for because.

Phi 2:13  “For(because) it is God who works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure.”

Some of you probably still don’t get the answer, but it is there.  Work out your own salvation, is not the jest of that saying, He is not saying, work out your own salvation(.)  No, he’s saying “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, that’s where the emphases is, on fear and trembling, not on work out your own salvation.  You work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, why?  Because it all depends on God.  If God doesn’t do it, it won’t happen, IT WON’T HAPPEN.  So we live in fear and trepidation.
I can not drive down the street, being the safest driver I can, and know that I will avoid an accident, if God has already determined I’m going to have one.  What it doesn’t mean is you can drive down the road foolishly or you don’t need to wear a seat belt or close your eyes for a while or something like that.
But you do act it out.  Why? You have to, He makes you.  He made you come out of your mother’s womb, and He made you cry.  Not that He forced you, but circumstances, He brought about all the circumstances.  He made you cry, makes you grow and makes you fight with your kid brother.  You do all these things and people reach a place where they get tired of it.  So we have plays ‘Stop the world I want to get off,’  I’ve had enough….I’m at the end of my rope…. it’s the end of the line.  Well it’s only the end of the line if God has determined it’s the end of the line.  If say you came to that conclusion at 8:30, and He knows you won’t die until your 771/2, your not going to end it.
That’s where the fear and trepidation come in, it all depends on God, there’s nothing you can do.  But YOU have to work it out.  YOU have to get up and go to work.  And YOU have to do all this stuff.  And then you say I don’t want to, well circumstances make you.
So you think, I’ll just end it all, then your child comes up and says ‘Mommie.’  Now you say, oh gosh I have a child, I can’t kill myself I’ve got to live for my child.  You see?  And so God makes you live this life.  He makes you do all this, HE MAKES YOU DO IT.  But not against your will.  He puts you in circumstances and that’s the only way you can go.  The ONLY way!

You think, I shouldn’t have done this or that.  That’s right you shouldn’t think that way.  You should think, that I shouldn’t have done that, because then your learning.  And when you learn, you will then put that into practice.  Because God doesn’t have you learn things so you can’t put them into practice.  He has you learn things so you CAN put them into practice.  But the only way you will learn them, is if you see how stupid it was, and you say if I had it to do over, I wouldn’t have done that.  So you had to do them, because that lead to a lot of trouble and pain and sorrow.  But did you learn your lesson?  Well yea.  Then don’t do it again, Ok, now their back on track.
But the whole human race does not comprehend, they do not have free-will.  They have a will based on everything, that everything makes them do.  That’s there free-will.

When you think about this you can go crazy, because the whole thing is bizarre.

You think if this is what God wanted and He is eternal, why didn’t He do it a zillion years ago.  So this plays right into the hands of what I am talking about, but not completely.  Because we have this thing of eternity, which has no beginning.  I mean if anything exists, something has to eternally exist.  And that’s just it.  At least as we understand the law of physics and so on.  If you have nothing, you can not from nothing have something.  Something eternally must exist, because WE exist.
This (knocks on table) is here, I’m here, you’re here, and we know we’re here and we know we did not eternally exist.  Because you have a birthday, same day every year, so you’re here and can’t deny it.  So we know we weren’t always here and as we study history and people study paleontology, anthology and all the other -ologys, nothing eternally existed.  Then you get into quantum mechanics, astrology, astronomy and astrophysics and all those things.  We find that nothing in it’s present state, always existed.
So then we see all these galaxies out there and they are moving, and there moving outward.  Well if they are moving out, they must have been at one time, in, makes sense, right?  And if they were in, this far back in history, then further back they must have been further in too.  So if you keep backing up just sheer logic would tell you that it all came together at one point.  But now you got another quandary though.  Since it comes together, so it was together at one time?  Is that how it started out?
The reason it came together, is because gravity drew it together.  But it couldn’t have always been that way, because then gravity couldn’t have drawn it in, because it was never out.
Oh well, maybe it was out and it drew it in, then it exploded out and then drew it in.  So what, it’s the same thing.
Modern man doesn’t go back 50,00 years on this earth, of course not.  So if you have the pulsating universe you solve the problem, you got to go back to the first pulse.  Where did that first matter come from?  That first pulse?
Your mind goes crazy.  You say well it’s just there and it got so tight, it just explodes.  But wait a minute, how did it get tight?
Maybe it never came in, it only goes out.  Because if it comes in and goes out that’s a two process thing, and we want to look for the original process.  So if it didn’t come in first to go out, then it only went out.  So if it went out first, out from where?  It was gravity that was drawing it in?   Your mind can’t handle it.  There is no where to go with that!?  Where did the blob that drew itself in and then exploded into the expanding universe, where did it come from?  And if it eternally existed, how could it eternally exist in a state that would allow for that?  It’s drawn in so tight it’s going to explode, so how can it eternally exist in a state that won’t tolerate that?  You see what I’m saying!?
Well then where did it get that way!?  You see what I’m saying?  Where did it get that way?  You think well it was that way eternally, but it couldn’t have been eternally that way.  Because it can’t function in that form, it would blow up.  Well where did it come from?  How did it blow up?  Your brain can’t take this any further!
Space is endless and you keep going and going.  It just can’t be.  Do you come to a wall?  Well what’s on the other side of the wall?  Nothing?  That’s what space is?

So I say the whole thing is bizarre.  And I say that in love and hopefully with a little wisdom.  This whole creation is bizarre.  God is doing like He said in Isaiah 28:21 “a strange work.”

I want to be honest with what I know and what I learn.  But I don’t know where to find it.  I read all these books and all this stuff and most of it is garbage, if you want to find answers.  Now you can learn knowledge, but you won’t get any answers.
The religious people hate the scientist and the scientist despise religion.  Yet a creation demands a creator and it demands a beginning.  But how can you have a beginning, if there is not a starting point?  Yet the scientist are forced to believe that it had a creation.  It had to start, but from where?  From out here or in here or where did it start?  And if it started there, how long was it there?  You say, well it had to be eternal.  Well it can’t stay in that state, eternally, that’s why it blew up and moved out.

And now do you know what they discovered about this?  Well here’s the theories about what’s going to happen to the universe.
Some say it will expand indefinitely, just keep on going forever.
Then some say it will just expand until everything is just so far away from everything, that the gravitational pull is like nonexistent.  And it will just stagnant out there.
But still others say it will slow down and slow down, stagnant, come to a stop, and eventually, even though the gravitational pull is very very slow, it will very slowly start to bring it back.  But of course as it comes back further and further and the bodies get closer and closer and gravity gets stronger and stronger, the bodies will move faster and faster.  And it will come crashing back in again and then explodes again!?
But they have discovered something recently.  I don’t know how they discovered it, they do this through the doppler effect and all that stuff.
But now the theory is, if it started in an explosion because it appears that everything is moving out.  And it’s moving out at  millions of miles an hour, very fast.  But if it started with an explosion and it is moving out, the initial thrush would send it out at a certain speed, right?  Then logic would tell you it would have to slow down.  Guess what they found out?  That it is speeding up!?  Where all the mass is centered some place, rather than pulling it back, it is pushing it out faster and faster.  How do you square that with anything we know in physics?

[comment was made that gravity has never been fully explained]
Not fully explained, fully, (chuckle).  I just read this someplace.
This one scientist said there is not two astrophysics in the world, that can even begin to give us a logical explanation about how a child’s magnet works.  You say not fully explained it, they have no clue about gravity, not a clue.
[comment: the sun’s keeps the earth in the gravitational orbit, it’s a balance so the planets won’t go flying off into space]
Yes, but not completely, all of the planet bodies are needful of it.  But if you pull Saturn out or if you pull out Mercury, eventually we’re going to die.  They all balance this elliptical orbit and the speed and everything.  So if you pull any one of the planets (well maybe not Pluto-laughter), but if you pull out Jupiter or Saturn or Neptune and you pull them out of the solar system, we will die.

[comment: what would happen first, say if you pulled the sun out?  Would it get dark first, what would happen first the gravitational pull or the lose of life]  Well either way, we’re gone.  [If the sun was pulled out, how soon would the gravitational pull take us out into the universe]  The gravitational pull to the outside is very slight.
A scientist said in relation to astrology, as they say you are born under a certain star, it has to do with the gravitational pull on something.  Well he said there is a thousand times more gravity exerted on the new born child by the physical body of the doctor, then the whole outer space combined.  It was the doctor’s physical mass holding the baby, that exerts a thousand times more gravitational pull on the baby, which is almost infinitesimally nothing.  But still it is a thousand times more than the sun or any other body.  It’s very very little.

Now you get a big orbit of the earth.  You have that because there is no friction in space, strictly centripetal force keeping it out there.  Speed will keep it out there, but then you got this crazy orbit thing.  If you had round orbit it would make sense, but you have an elliptical orbit.  So if it flies by the sun and goes all the way out here and makes the swing and come back, why doesn’t it come back and crash into the sun?  Well it’s far enough out and the speed that it by passes it, without that happening.  But it needs all the other planets to do there thing.  They’re all orbiting and doing there thing to the fraction of a thousandth of a second, it is perfect timing.
The earth is so finitely balanced with a thousand other things, if you move any one of them, we’re all dead!  [comment: Just like God made it.]  Just like God made it.

Blocks to Feeling God

The most relevant factors are sometimes the very ones we think have no influence over us. The possibilities we will look at, here presented in a different order, include:

	Spiritual blockages
	Persistent guilt feelings that seem disturbingly real and deserved despite seeking God’s forgiveness
	Undetected clinical depression
	Past hurts that could be unconsciously driving you to shut down your feelings
	Haunted by being unable to think of a single reason why God would love you
	Nagging doubts about God’s goodness
	Fearing you are not one of God’s favorites
	Expecting a sign from God
	Misunderstanding God’s ways

My prayer is that the Lord will highlight to you every factor influencing you, as you prayerfully read the entire webpage. Yes, I’ve had to mention prayer twice in the one sentence. To fulfill my role I must pray, but for you to receive full help, so must you. In fact, let’s pray right now:

Lord, I need you to cut through all my delusions, and open my eyes to spiritual reality. I am so keen to have a fulfilling relationship with you that I will read this entire webpage, looking to you to empower me to identify which parts are relevant to me. I want this entire matter sorted out in my life and I am determined to pay whatever it costs to bring this about.

Feelings Versus Reality

Surprisingly many celebrities envied for their beauty feel unattractive. Countless students have felt sure they have failed their exam 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 disregard their feelings and trust solely the plane’s instrumentation. 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, feelings seem so real and convincing. Never is this more true than when it comes to feeling unloved. There are 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. Let’s explore these reasons.

Unforgivably Guilty?

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.

Just as instructions for using a DVD recorder are useless if you do not have a DVD recorder, so this webpage is of no use until you are genuinely reborn spiritually and understand the experience. 

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. As we have already seen, there is a vast difference between reality and feelings. Most of us will need to keep reading.

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, 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 you 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 adding pure water to a bucket of contaminated water. 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 loving someone else – seems quite impossible. We forget, however, that the Lord is very different to 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 an infant. 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.”

Having children is 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 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, loving for no reason would be insane. But true 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 loves 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 take the place of 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 second hand 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 job, 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 on to those around me, and even God, the negative way I felt 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 I understand what is happening, I’m no longer shaken by it.

Pain Avoidance Techniques

So you could be unable to feel God’s love because 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 it makes the stakes frighteningly high should that person later reject us. To love someone is to make ourselves highly vulnerable. It 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.

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. If someone is terrified of spiders, it will take more than becoming intellectually convinced that a particular spider is harmless, to remove his fear. 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, depends on your personality, not on 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.

Suppose someone is beaten up and sustains a spinal injury that allows him to walk but he is left with some loss of feeling in his legs. That does not make him any less lovable. Many of us have been beaten up emotionally and have been left with a loss of feeling in our emotions. That’s unfortunate, but is should not let it have any effect on our relationship with God.

If a devout woman of God broke her neck and lost all physical feeling, we’d be shocked if she let that hinder her spiritually. We’d expect a great man or woman of God to maintain closeness to the Lord, not matter what. Likewise, we should not allow not being able to feel emotionally hinder us spiritually.

Negative Expectations

Many of us are convinced that we are unlovable. Some of grown up expecting our father to be cold and indifferent and deep down think God must be the same. Some of us have actually had it drummed into us that since childhood that we are unalterably evil.

Christians feeling such things or having suffered such a background will always be half expecting God to reject them or at least be frowning on them or aloof. Consequently, they are strongly pressured 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.

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 references to faith/believe for every variant of “feel.”

“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 say 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 a sign from God that he loves us.

Expecting 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 so grow in faith, that precious commodity that is 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. We repeatedly find ourselves in such situations because God is so intellectually superior to us.

Doubting God’s Goodness

You are sure to unconsciously keep your emotions in check when relating to God if you fear he could have a cruel streak. No normal person would feel secure about giving his or her heart to someone who might possibly be callous, or even sneak some twisted pleasure out of slaughtering innocents, or tormenting people in hell, or in any other way have less than the highest conceivable morality.

To be more tenderhearted than any human; to love more than life itself both hate-crazed rapists and their innocent victims, is to live on an emotional nuclear bomb. Nevertheless, this is the agonizingly heart-wrenching place where God lives. To be the God of perfect justice, and yet merciful and forgiving, is to live on a knife-edge that demands terrifyingly stupendous wisdom. If you, in your wildest dreams, suppose you could do better that the God of perfection, it is because in this infinitesimal fragment of eternity, you know only a fraction of the facts and the final destinies of those involved.

The Lord could have stripped us all of our dignity and freedom of choice, enslaving humanity so that it is impossible for any of us to make wrong decisions and hurt people. Yes, such iron control would remove evil, but it would also remove all good. If robbed of choice, every human action would be reduced to moral neutrality. We could never know the joyous fulfillment and honor of having chosen correctly.

You cannot congratulate a robot. Only its maker could be honored. God wants not machines but children – dignified beings who can be honored. For us to have the ability to make praiseworthy decisions, we must also be granted the ability to make blameworthy decisions. To be destined to rule as royalty with God for all eternity necessitates the freedom to make horrific mistakes. Love does not enslave; it sets free.

God is love, and love takes enormous risks, because there is no other way to love. “If you love something, set it free; if it comes back it’s yours, if it doesn’t, it never was,” Richard Bach. This principle is the driving force behind all that God does.

God is good. He is perfect in all his ways. He is infinitely trustworthy.

When it Seems God has Favorites

If we confuse circumstances with God’s favor, we are bound to suffer bouts of feeling unloved. Until we understand the heart of God and his plans for us, there is little that is more likely to crush our ability to feel loved than when God seems to be blessing others more than us.

Let’s examine the reasons why it is so common for us to mistakenly think God has favorites. (If you don’t require all the detail provided in this section, feel free to just skim through it.)

• If spring could tip-toe past nature without stirring it from its winter slumber; if the sun could slip through the sky without dispelling the night; if rain could fall to the ground without bringing life to the desert – only then should you fear dry times, dark times, lean times.

Not Seeing the Big Picture

One of Jesus’ most chilling expressions was, “they have received their reward in full” (Matthew 6:2,5,16). Despite seeming blessed of God, their current satisfaction, smugness or “fifteen minutes of fame” is all they will ever get. .

There are those who by missing out down here are storing up treasure in heaven and there are those who are the envy of people down here, but will live in eternal regret. “What is highly valued among men is detestable in God’s sight” (Luke 16:15).

To illustrate, Jesus compared Lazarus, a diseased, despised beggar, with a hard-hearted rich man, who seemed to be basking in God’s blessing. For all eternity, their situations will be reversed (Luke 16:19-26). Another time, Jesus told of the farmer who seemed so divinely favored that he had to build bigger barns to store all his wealth, but his riches were of no consequence because he would die and his bumper harvests were the only “blessing” he would ever receive (Luke 12:16-21).

So what matters is not current circumstances – whether our own of those of other people. Over and over, Jesus taught that everyone’s existence takes an astounding twist; a terrifying or heart-stoppingly thrilling reversal of fortune, in the next life. The proud will be humbled. The humble will be exalted. The first will end up last. The meek will inherit the earth. Jesus revealed that at the end of the age, when the “sheep” are separated from the “goats,” both classes of people will be shocked. Neither had imagined the stupendous and eternal implications of their seemingly minor decisions (Matthew 25:31-46). He spoke of three servants entrusted with money. Two worked hard, one had a life of ease, but the day of reckoning came (Matthew 25:14-30).

Jesus’ own life highlights the great reversal. He went from the cross to the throne; from earthly shame to eternal glory; from apparent rejection from God to being exalted by him. The final twist was staggering. And he told us to take up our cross and follow him on this astounding journey.

In the short term, the ungodly can indeed prosper and, like Jesus, God’s children can get a raw deal. It is vital that we focus on the eternal, not current “blessings.” When we confuse the two, everything slips out of focus and we will wrongly think God is overlooking us.

Blessed are the poor, the meek, the persecuted, said Jesus. There are Christians who will spend all eternity rejoicing in the blessing of having on earth suffered severe persecution and defamation. And there are Christians who will suffer eternal loss, as if a fire had ripped through their home, destroying everything they owned (1 Corinthians 3:11-15).

Seasons in God

Job crashed from prosperity to poverty, from health to sickness and from a large, happy family to devastating grief. Throughout it all there was not the slightest fluctuation in God’s love for him. Joseph went from being the pampered, favorite son, to being a slave, then branded a rapist and incarcerated as a criminal and finally exalted to political power, fame and fortune – all without any change in God’s attitude to him. David moved from shepherd boy to giant killer, to King’s son-in-law, to fugitive, to King – with God being proud of him the whole time.

We could talk of Elijah, who slid from mountain top, to depression, to spectacular entry to heaven. Or we could burst out of the Old Testament into the New, and see the mightily blessed apostle Paul often having not even enough to eat, suffering horrific beatings, unjust prison sentences, pounded by natural disasters (snake bite, several ship wrecks, and so on) and God refusing to answer his prayers (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). On and on we could go, showing from God’s revelation to humanity (the Bible) that changing fortunes need not indicate changes in God’s favor.

To always be in fruit would kill a tree. As trees cycle from dormancy, to blossom, to fruitfulness, to loss and dormancy, without fluctuations in God’s blessing, so people basking in God’s blessing have seasons of growth and fruitfulness and seasons of loss, dryness and barrenness. The main difference between spiritual seasons and natural seasons is that nature moves in unison, whereas at any one time, different Christians in the same locality will be in different spiritual seasons. Some people will be over the moon, pampered with spiritual goose bumps, like John when receiving his revelation. Others will be languishing in the midst of an oppressive trial, like John was, as a prisoner on Patmos, when his vision commenced (Revelation 1:9). It would be a grave misunderstanding to think this means some have God’s favor and some do not, or to think you have fallen out of God’s love and blessing, when it is simply a change of season.

As I have said elsewhere:

You might be envious of the Apostle Paul, thinking you would feel so loved of God if the Lord had appeared to you in blinding light as he did to Paul. But would you feel loved of God if, like Paul, you reeled from one catastrophe to another – shipwreck after shipwreck, years languishing in prison, religious leaders wanting him dead, forsaken by Christians and so on?

Living in Unnecessary Spiritual Poverty

In Jesus’ famous parable, the prodigal son’s brother was jealous of the father’s extravagant display of love for the wayward son. “You’ve thrown a party, slaughtering the fatted calf for this no-hoper, when you haven’t given me so much as a little goat!” he complained bitterly.

The father’s reply is staggering: “Son, all that I have has always been yours for the taking” (Luke 15:29-31, my paraphrase).

This brother had been waiting for the father to give him things; never having sufficiently believed in his father’s love and generosity to have realized that he could have helped himself to everything.

Some people help themselves to God’s blessings, simply because they choose to believe the Bible when it says that God is love, does not show favoritism , that he has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ (Ephesians 1:3), and so on. Others miss out, not because they are any less loved, or that God doesn’t want them to have it, but simply because they fail to take God at his word.

Different Callings

The Scriptures reveal that Christians differ so greatly from each other that they are like totally different bodily organs. Some of us are like eyes – spiritually perceptive but delicate and useless for carrying anything. Some are like arms – strong and useful but can sense very little. Being destined to fulfill different roles in the body of Christ means that some people will be more spiritually perceptive than others, not because God is moving more powerfully in their lives, and certainly not because they are more loved of God, but simply because they are called to perform a different function in the body than other parts.

Just as everyone sees your nose and no one sees your kidneys, some parts of Christ’s body will, of necessity, be more noticed than others. Again, this is solely because of their function. Prominence in the body does not in the slightest mean prominence in the heart of God. In fact, as Scripture points out, God has ordained that those parts of the body that get all the attention – such as our hair – are actually less important than parts that are out of sight.

Personality Types

Some people’s personality cause them to regularly soar and plunge from dizzy peaks to darkened valleys, while certain individuals have moods that barely change from one day or week to the next. Those of us whose personality type keeps our emotions on a steady course can end up feeling inferior – and feel less loved by God – simply because we have never had the highs of those Christians who suffer great highs are lows. On the other hand, people whose personality takes them on an emotional roller coaster, instead of realizing the uniqueness of their highs, often feel inferior because Christians who rarely suffer such lows because their emotional journey is much flatter.

Especially because too few Christians are brutally honest about their down times, the spiritual grass always seems greener in someone else’s life.

We might be envious of Elijah when God was working miracles through him, but none of us envy him when he was in the pits of depression wishing he were dead (1 Kings 19:4).

Poetic License?

Yet another complicating factor is that what happens inside of us is virtually indescribable. Some people are so poetic in their attempts to describe their feelings that even if those hearing the description had the identical experience, they wouldn’t recognize it and would still feel envious.

So comparing our own spiritual journey with what we know of that of other Christians is strewn with spiritual danger. To quote myself again:

Eleven thousand teachers competed with Christa McAuliffe and lost. The winner of a seat on space shuttle Challenger was the envy of millions – until the shuttle disintegrated soon after take-off. Eleven thousand losers suddenly became winners.

In the twinkling of an eye, the first shall be last (1 Corinthians 15:52; Matthew 20:16; Luke 16:15) . Until that wondrous moment, don’t assume you’re a loser.

Despite God insisting in his Word that he loves each of us with all of his heart, we are all subject to many factors that give the upsetting illusion that others are more loved of God than us. No wonder faith is so critical to the Christian life. Without faith in the integrity of God’s word and his love, we will never see past the temporary and superficial, to the heart of God.

If God Loved Me He Wouldn’t Have . . .

It is hard to find anyone in Scripture of whom God is proud, who did not suffer what must have felt like endless times when it seemed to the untrained eye that God was acting unlovingly towards that person.

Over and over, Scripture praises Abraham for his faith, and yet he must surely have endured many times with the thought churning through in his mind, “If God really loved me he would have given me a son by now. I’m getting too old even to enjoy a child.”

I can well imagine Joseph thinking, “If God loved me, he wouldn’t have sold me into slavery.” Yet, after year upon year of setbacks, he ended up declaring to his brothers, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good . . .” (Genesis 50:20).

We are so much like children thinking, “If Daddy loved me he would have let me run on to the busy road, he’d let me play with matches, he wouldn’t insist I eat vegetables . . .” Other times, we are like athletes selected for Olympic glory, thinking that if the coach truly cared about us he wouldn’t set us grueling training sessions.

Every time I cannot see the love and wisdom behind God’s actions, I am displaying my ignorance and folly. To plunder other writings of mine:

Embraced by divine love, your life will be tinged with mystery but aglow with glory.

Tucked in the heart of Scripture sleeps a tiny psalm of precious truth (Psalm 131) . The singer confessed that as a mother denies her baby access to her milk when it’s time for her darling to be weaned, so God sometimes denies us things we crave. Yet as a weaned infant lies warm and secure in its mother’s bosom, our soul can nestle into God, not knowing why we have been denied that which we have clamored for, but content to draw love and comfort from the Father’s heart.

As the heavens soar far above us, high and unreachable, so is God’s wisdom (Isaiah 55:8-9; Psalm 139:6; 147:5; Romans 11:33-34; Job 11:7-9) . Our tiny minds may understand the Father’s ways no more than a babe understands its mother, yet still we can rest in him, bathed in the certainty that when the omnipotent, omniscient Lord lets the inexplicable touch a child of his, it is a manifestation of unfathomable love. In the hands of the One who wouldn’t so much as break a damaged reed or snuff a smoking wick, you are safe (Matthew 12:20).

Spiritual Blockages

Isaiah 59:1-2 Surely the arm of the LORD is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.

Psalm 66:18 If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened

The Lord is exceedingly tolerant of those who keep battling sin despite losing often. These are people who have yet to discover how to appropriate Christ’s victory into their lives, but as long as they keep seeking forgiveness and keep seeking victory, their falls are in an entirely different category to those who and have not the slightest intention of giving up willful sin. Those who abuse God’s grace by deliberately sinning without any genuine remorse are in grave spiritual danger and they can certainly expect this to end up seriously affecting their relationship with God.

Then there are those who have unrepentant sin in their lives and are unaware that God disapproves. At the end of this page is a link under Spiritual Blockages to the testimony a woman who suddenly found that God seemed distant. It turned out that this was the Lord’s way of getting her to seek him and to discover that there were matters (in her case, previous dabbling in the occult) God wanted her to repent of. Up until then, her Lord had tolerated this being in her past, but he decided that now was the time for her to learn that it is spiritually dangerous and to deal with it.

Wrap-Up

We all know about anorexia and how people – often women – can be attractive and yet be fooled by a cruel trick of the mind into being thoroughly convinced that they are repulsively overweight. This is not just a devastating delusion; it can kill.

There is something very similar that crushes marriages – women who are gorgeous in their husband’s eyes and yet feel so undesirable that they shrink from their husband’s advances. Not only do these women undergo needless distress, it cripples the entire relationship; greatly hindering, or even destroying, intimacy and lovemaking and the couple’s enjoyment of each other. The most distressing aspect of this tragedy is that all the suffering is completely needless because the husband is thrilled with his wife’s appearance, and yet this fact keeps bouncing off the woman. Either, despite all her husband’s pleas, she does not believe him, or she is so caught up in her own delusion that she allows her mistaken self-image to enslave her, rather than delighting in what she knows is her husband’s view of her. Either way, the husband reels in the pain of rejection and the frustration of seeing his beloved suffering and yet spurning all his efforts to convince her of how desirable she is.

An almost identical tragedy devastates relationships with God when much of the Lord’s delight in us is dismissed as a lie, merely because it does not match our feelings. Or the tragedy hits when we are so self-absorbed with our own feelings and distorted self-image that we have little interest in how thrilled God is with us.

The choice is ours. We can cave in to oppressive feelings, letting them bluff us into spoiling our relationship with God. Or we can press on, despite our feelings, and enter into the countless blessings God has for us.

Feelings not based on truth are as useless and dangerous as drug-induced highs. Truth depends on facts, not feelings. It’s facts, not feel-good delusions, that we need and it is precisely these critical, life-changing facts that the Bible deals with.

Chasing feelings is like chasing the end of rainbows. To be a feeling-junkie is to throw your life away, as surely as mainlining heroin. To stake your spiritual life on the integrity of God’s love and his Word, however, is to store up treasure in heaven, where the interest rates are out of this world.

Ridiculously old and childless, Abraham didn’t feel like he would end up a father of many nations. Scared and ill-quipped, Joshua, Gideon, young David and so many other heroes of the faith, didn’t feel like facing the enemy. Tired and discouraged by a fruitless night, Peter and his fishing partners didn’t feel like obeying Jesus and launching into the deep. Frail and outnumbered in a jostling crowd, the hemorrhaging woman didn’t feel like fighting through the throng to touch Jesus’ cloak. Sweating, as it were, drops of blood, Jesus didn’t feel like doing God’s will. Tortured time and again, the apostle Paul kept having to pray for the courage just to keep going (Ephesians 6:19-20; Philippians 1:20).

The entire Bible is bursting with people who didn’t feel like doing the very thing that made them heroes of the faith. They felt defeated and insignificant, but they kept on anyhow. They treated their feelings with as much disdain as pests. Like troublesome flies, unwanted feelings persist but heaven’s heroes press on regardless. They push through the doubt, fear and pain, and keep going despite everything within them screaming that it is hopeless. That’s the heart of a champion. And you were born again to treat your feelings with that same contempt and perpetuate this glorious tradition of spiritual champions by clinging to the belief that God is on your side and loves you passionately, despite everything within you screaming the opposite.

You weren’t born to be a groveling, shame-faced feeling-junkie. Cut the umbilical cord tethering you to spiritual babyhood and soar with spiritual giants to the realm of faith. You can do it! It’s a promise from God himself.