Copyright 2014 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
“God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us, as it were, off our guard. Our preparations to receive Him sometimes have the opposite effect.” -C.S. Lewis
Most of us who have been believers for any length of time know the disappointment of having expected the feeling of God’s presence in some seemingly hallowed place or time and, instead, having faced His unanticipated absence. Whether it was at a special worship service or during a holiday like Easter, we hoped to delight in a proverbial “mountaintop experience,” only to come away disheartened by the emotional flatness we ended up feeling.
Many Christian teachers would zero-in on the use of the word “feeling,” chastising anyone who would expect an emotional high from our Lord at all, much less on cue. I am sympathetic to the idea that the Christian walk is much more about our wills than our emotions, but having experienced some amazing and life-altering encounters with the presence of God myself, I’m reluctant to jump on that particular bandwagon. In my opinion the issue is far more about our expectations of God than about whether or not it is “spiritually correct” to desire to know Him in a passionately experiential way. The crux of the matter is found in that term, “on cue.”
No one has the power to make God bless them in any way; deity is not Deity if it can be compelled by anyone or anything. When people allow themselves to be disappointed by God because their desire for an emotional experience with Him has not been fulfilled, they may do so because they simply are frustrated by not being able to manipulate Him. This almost always happens on a subconscious level. Hopefully very few Christians openly believe that they have the ability to influence their Creator to give them something that He has willed not to give them, but what is going on beneath the surface of our conscious mind is another matter.
When making a pilgrimage to Israel as a very young believer, I remember expecting that each holy site would send me into paroxysms of holy ecstasy It seemed like the more I wanted this to happen, the less I felt anything except frustration. My negative emotional response belied my basic spiritual immaturity at that time. I now realize that I was trying to pre-empt God’s will for me on that trip. Perhaps the Holy Spirit wanted to reach out to me quietly, without emotional fireworks; but I missed out on this, having been so busy trying to feel something of my own design. The ironic thing is that a few days after my return home, I found myself on “the mountaintop” emotionally: in New Jersey of all places! It was as if the Lord was showing me that He is everywhere the same, whether in the “Holy Land” or Bergen County, U.S.A, and that the movements of His Spirit are mysterious…by His design and for my own good.
It does seem to be a truism that God often likes to catch us, as C.S. Lewis said, “off our guard” as He did with me all those years ago. It also seems safe to assert that one reason He does this is to teach us that we cannot acquire a spiritual high the way we might a worldly one. Many of God’s prerogatives are just that, His prerogatives. He will sovereignly bless us with His felt presence when He decides to, not when we are trying to work ourselves into that presence with a conscious or unconscious sense of entitlement.
We can put ourselves into a willed position of worship, but we cannot summon the Holy Fire; this must be sent from above. Submission to this truth is just a part of our coming to better know and love our Lord. As that happens, the floodgates of heavenly experience may be thrown open in our lives in ways we never thought possible.
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