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Transcript 345C — Feeling Distant from the Lord
CALLER: Why is it that you feel close to the Lord one day and far away from Him the next?
HC: A question was raised concerning the problem of feeling very close to the Lord one day, and maybe the next day even wondering, "Am I really born again?" How can we have this great a change in our sensitivity toward what God has done in our life?
The Christian walk is not a walk of feelings and emotions. When the sun is bright, it's a beautiful day, all has been going well, you wake up in the morning, you had a good night's rest, you bounce out of bed, and my, isn't it glorious to be a Christian! God is on the throne, all is well.
But then, the next day you received a letter, and there was tragic news in it. And then you went to work and you lost your job. And more than that, the next morning when you wake up, it's raining. It's a dark, dismal day. You hardly slept through the night because of all of the anxieties that have begun to come over you. And so you wake up in the morning and you wonder, "Is God really on the throne? Am I really related to Him? How could it be that things are going the way they are?" And so you begin to question the whole thing, the whole business of salvation, your own personal relationship. You wonder where truth is.
This is what happens when we live by an emotional response to God. Actually, we should be living not by our emotions, because our emotions can change overnight, depending on the vicissitudes, the experiences of life. But we should be living by the Word of God. The Word of God stands true all the time. We know we are saved because of what the Bible declares, not because of the way we feel. We know we are saved because God has told us what salvation is, and we can identify with what we find in the Bible. And thus we have an anchor upon which to hang our soul.
God was not playing idly around when He penned the words of Psalm 23: "The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not want . . . Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." Now it's one thing to go by green pastures and quiet pools, that earlier this Psalm talks about. "That's great – I feel great – God is on the throne – I'm saved – Praise the Lord." But when I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, when at any moment I might lose my life, when terror stalks my door and I don't know, humanly speaking, what the future holds at all, is God still on the throne? Yes, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil."
God is faithful. He always remains faithful. We are the ones that are not always faithful. If you make a practice in your life to spend time in the Word, if you make a practice in your life to spend time communicating with God through prayer, so that when you begin to feel uneasy, so that when you begin to feel like things are not going well, you have learned to abandon yourself afresh to the Lord Jesus Christ, you have learned to again cast all your cares on Him, to pour it out to Him and rest in Him, then you will find that you're not going to go from a low to a high and back to a low again, emotionally speaking. There'll be a constancy about your life, where you know, "I am saved. I am saved because I know that Christ is my Redeemer. I know that I want to serve Him with my life. I know that He is on the throne. No matter how gloomy the day may be, know that it is well with my soul."
This is the walk of the mature Christian. This is what I would desire for each one of us.