Don’t Allow Your Feelings To Dictate Your Faith
What are you led by, your feelings or your faith? Do you allow your emotions to dictate your actions and be your guide, or do you allow your faith in God to lead and guide you?
It is so easy for many of us to get so emotional and all fired up for God when we are at a good church service and surrounded by our spiritual cheerleaders. We get so spiritual when good things happen to us or we encounter a miracle! Are emotions are revved up and we can really feel God’s presence at that point. But what about when we leave the church service or when our lives are filled with distractions, circumstances, and responsibilities? What happens when our lives take a turn for the worst and we have no one to turn to? What happens then? Do we grab hold of God and hold on tight, or do we spend less time with God and more time worrying about our situation? Many of us at this point, instead of saying “I feel God’s presence” we say “I feel so spiritually empty” or “I can’t hear God’s voice”. We tend to feel far from God and unable to feel his presence. What are we doing wrong???
We should not be led by our feelings but should be led by our faith! Our priorities are all mixed up! We rather read drama or something funny over reading our Bible! We are quick to connect to the internet and social media rather than connect to God! We get too busy, too tired, or too lazy to spend quality time each day with God! That spiritual high that we had begins to disappear until the next good service or miraculous encounter. This is how we do God? This is what our world consists of when we base our relationship with God on feelings instead of our Faith in Him!
In Ephesians 2:8 it reminds us that our salvation comes through our faith and not our feelings. Our feelings are unreliable and inconsistent, so why would we base our salvation on them instead of our faith? We can’t base our relationship with God on something so inconsistent. God is not cheap fling that we pick up and put down. He is not a poor connection that we mysteriously loose the signal from time to time! Instead of waiting for the next spiritual high or miraculous encounter, we need to be in God’s presence on an every day basis!
So how can we be in God’s presence and experience His love every day? We have to have discipline! Do you realize that discipline and disciple have the same root? When we accept Jesus as our personal Lord and Saviour, we are to become His disciples! A disciple is a follower of Christ and we must have discipline to obtain the self-control needed to obey God and to spend quality time with Him so that we know His voice and can hear Him! Rather than seeking the next spiritual high, we need to seek our daily communication with Him by reading our Bibles and praying, both of which requires discipline!
We often claim to have discipline when we want to lose weight. We get all kinds of will power and we lose the weight but then what happens? We often gain the weight back because we are not disciplined enough to keep the weight off which is the real test. When you reach your desired weight, you must maintain it! You can’t just stop working out and eating right and expect to maintain your nice figure. You have to work just as hard to maintain your weight.
In our walk with Christ, we are going to have days where we are tired and don’t feel like connecting with God. Sometimes we may hear God very clearly, and other times He may remain quiet. We must realize that just because God is silent doesn’t mean He is not present. We also must remember that it is when we feel strong in our relationship with God that Satan will attack us the most. Jesus was tempted for 40 days immediately after being baptized! How many of us could have stayed strong and disciplined while being tempted for 40 days? That is why we must be disciplined and stay connected to God so that even in times of trials and tribulations we remain strong in our relationship with God!
Prayer is so important and vital in our spiritual lives just as breathing is to our physical life! When we pray and connect with God, His spirit begins to work in us. Prayer is the breath of our spiritual life. Also reading our Bible is where we get our knowledge and instructions so it shouldn’t be something we do only when we feel like it! It is a necessity to our spiritual growth!
Instead of treating spiritual encounters like a drug that the effects wear off in time, we need to remind ourselves that our relationship with God is not always going to be easy because Satan wants to steal, kill, and destroy us! Our relationship with God requires discipline, dedication, and most of all it requires FAITH! We can be confident in knowing that God doesn’t change no matter how much our feelings do!
BE FAITH LED, NOT EMOTIONALLY LED!
Thank you so much for reading my blog today! I am so excited to share some of my experiences and what God puts in me to share with you all. I appreciate your support and pray that you are encouraged, uplifted, and empowered by LaNise Speaks Life Blogs. Be sure to subscribe so that you are notified when there is a new blog post. I hope that you will continue to be blessed by these blogs!
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