There’s nothing quite like the sensation that jets up my spine when I hear a firey preacher speaking of the awesome power of God. There’s also no emotion equal to the feeling that produces tears in my eyes during a passionate praise song in which the entire church is singing with all they’ve got. Those are certainly highlights of my Christian walk and I think that all Christians should be involved in those kinds of events. But there’s more to it than that.
Special events and revivals are certainly a lot more exciting than raking leaves for the elderly widow who in my subdivision. 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. During those times I feel as though my faith rivals that of Noah or Elijah. 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 an occasional lesson 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.” I hate it when he tells me that. I want so badly to be doing what it is I feel I’m doing with the golf club, but more often than not I can’t feel what’s actually 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 my club or to video tape and watch for myself. The tape doesn’t lie and I’m often shocked at how I’m really positioning the golf club in comparison to what I felt. In fact, I am often surprised at how often my feelings mislead me entirely. Sometimes it feels like I’m doing the exact opposite of what the video shows me is reality.
We’re misled if we don’t apply that to our Christian 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. They feel good, but faith is not only about feelings. 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 to faith than simply participating in spiritual celebrations and it doesn’t always feel as good.
Feelings can be misleading. Surely you’ve felt something one day, only to feel nearly the opposite the next. I believe feelings and emotions are 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). So that means that it’s possible for us to feel as though we have faith to move mountains, yet in reality it could be that we have the dead faith spoken of in James 2:17. God calls us to “be” rather than to simply feel. He calls us to have real faith instead of only emotional highs.
Real faith is something others can see. That’s why James says in verse 18, “Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.” Faith can’t simply sit on a pew when there are people in the world who are lost from the fold of God. Faith can’t help but be demonstrated and that is what helps us know it is real. What shows we have real faith is when that faith compels us 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 to study the Bible with someone who can’t read.
That kind of faith is certainly something to feel good about.