There’s nothing quite like the sensation that jets up my spine when I hear a fiery preacher. There’s also no emotion equal to the feeling that often produces tears during a passionate praise song in which it seems the entire church is participating with all they’ve got. Those are certainly highlights of my Christian walk.
They’re certainly a lot more exciting than raking leaves for the elderly widow who lived in my subdivision when I was a teenager. Those pep-rally like times certainly make me feel closer to God than when I helped build a new roof for a family who couldn’t afford to pay someone to do the job. Yes, if I had to pick a time when I felt like a child of God, it would be during an emotionally charged assembly of the church. But is that really the case?
My Golf Swing and My Faith
I played college golf on scholarship and still play the game consistently to this day. In fact, I still take lessons from my college swing coach. There’s a saying that he spouts to me at nearly every lesson–“What you feel is not always real.”
In other words, just because I feel like I’m swinging the club a certain way, doesn’t make it so. The only way to really know what I’m doing is to have a professional watch me swing or to video tape it for myself. The tape doesn’t lie and I’m often shocked at what I’m really doing with the golf club in comparison to what I feel.
We’re misled if we don’t apply that to our faith as well. Sure, everyone loves those times when two thousand Christians are belting out a dramatically written song to God and those events are good. But faith is not only about feeling. Faith is about loving God with “all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:5; Mark 12:30). That’s a lot more than simply participating in spiritual celebrations.
Feelings and emotions are certainly part of being a Christian and in being a human in general. But God calls us to much more than that. God calls us to work. We certainly aren’t saved by works as Ephesians 2:8 tells us, but we aren’t saved by feelings either. We’re saved by God and therefore should take him seriously when he says, “faith without works is dead” (James 2:17).
What shows real faith is when it compels us to work to help the poor and to turn away from temptation. Real faith is when we stand for God in a society that runs the other way. Real faith causes us to occasionally leave the pampering pew and study the Bible with someone who can’t read.
That kind of faith is certainly something to feel good about.