How do we know God's listening?

betteroffread.com

 "Know that the LORD has set apart the godly for himself; the LORD will hear when I call to him."  Psalm 4:3 NIV

I have been discouraged lately because I feel my prayers do not go farther than the ceiling.  There are moments when I sit here at work, bow my head to pray and feel like my prayers don't go farther than the ceiling.  I've tried dimming the lights, lighting candles, playing worship music, standing, sitting, kneeling, walking laps around the firetrucks, sitting in total silence and journaling my prayers.  I still feel like I'm talking to myself.  There are times when I feel moments of incredible peace, where I can feel chills run through my body and feel the overwhelming sense of God in the place.  Those moments quickly fade and lately, I've felt a continual sense of nausea instead.

I've been one of those "touchy feely" Christians for a long time.  I use phrases like "I feel God is leading me here" or "I can sense God is saying that" or "I felt God tell me this."  However, I'm questioning the validity of following my feelings when it comes to prayer.  Lately, I haven't had one of those emotionally reassuring prayer times where God's presence is tangible.  I haven't felt the heaviness of God's hand on my shoulder or the surge of the Holy Spirit's power in my heart.  I noticed that when I stopped feeling those things, I stopped praying.  That's bad.  Somehow I have determined that if I cannot feel those positive sensations, I think that God isn't listening.  Yet the scripture above says that God hears the godly when they call out to Him.  And I know that the Scriptures also say that because of Jesus, we can comfortably call ourselves godly and approach the throne.  I can reach two conclusions: I either lose confidence in the Bible because my emotional experience is lacking or I can lose confidence in my feelings because they are misleading me.  So I've lost all confidence in my feelings.  I've determined there must be regulation of my feelings, a sense of logic and direction upon which I can determine if my feelings are generated by the Holy Spirit and righteous inclinations or by my own selfish ambition or oppressive spiritual forces of darkness.  

After reflection and thought, I am confident that the regulatory truth that determines if the motives of my heart are godly must be the Bible.  If I cannot feel or perceive something and the Scriptures teach me that the something I cannot feel indeed exists, the Scriptures ought to hold more weight.  If I feel that I am doing something righteous but the Scriptures tell me my behavior is sin, I should obey the Scriptures and not my own personal desires.  Ultimately, the Bible must be the "be all and end all" in terms of morality and truth.  Though recently I do not feel like God hears me when I speak to Him, the Bible tells me that he has set apart the godly for himself and hears us when we call.  The truth of the Scriptures must reign supreme over my personal sensation that I am talking to myself.

I wish I could have the confidence of David, the writer of Psalm 4.  David spoke to God, called out to Him and knew that God would answer Him.  There is no optimistic hope that God might hear His call.  The verse doesn't say, "I think God has set me apart, I hope He hears my prayer."  David is entirely confident that God hears him when he prays.  And this was before the Holy Spirit came to live in the hearts of believers (for more than a moment) and before Jesus became our sin so we can become God's righteousness.  David has an impressive level of comfort in the truth that His God loved him and heard his cries.  Even with the knowledge of Christ crucified and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, my confidence wavers based upon my emotional experience.

mommylife.net

In what have I placed my confidence?  My feelings?  The sensation that God is with me?  Or the truth that the Bible is valid and that it tells me that God hears me when I pray?  It's got to be the Bible, it's got to be the mind-boggling, overwhelming, powerful truth that the God of the Universe pays attention to me.  I feel so small in the presence of such a large God that I think He must hear me the way I hear the buzz of a fly.  Yet the Bible says He set believers apart and that He hears us when we call to Him.  If I follow my feelings, God has abandoned me.  If I believe the truth of the Scriptures, God hears every word that I speak to Him.  I have to believe the Bible over my feelings because my feelings tell me lies and the Scriptures tell me truth.  

Where does my emotionally based theology originate?  I think there are three major forces at work that contribute to my inaccurate gauge of God's presence: (1.) worship settings, (2.) my flesh, and (3.) Satan and spiritual force of darkness.

1. I notice that a good portion of the evangelical church's worship services and teachings are designed to evoke a certain level of emotionalism.  Often songs and services manipulate the fragility of human emotion to create a somewhat artificial experience of God's presence.  Lights, songs, fog on the stage, a dark room, a cool video, and a powerful teaching can make even the most ardent of atheists believe they might have left earth for an hour.  I am not saying that these things are intrinsically bad and that we should not utilize them.  I see their purpose and I think they are fantastic tools to create an aesthetically pleasing atmosphere.  I do think, however, that the unintentional consequence is that we can begin to think God's presence is the same as our emotional reaction to the "cool" elements that characterize our worship services. I know I make that connection.  Perhaps I am digressing a bit here, but I think that we may be creating a false expectation of our personal prayer times.  Simply put, it's not nearly as cool and emotional  in our devotional time as it is when we are at church or a conference.
2. I know that my flesh plays a major role in my emotional perspective.  I worship God and pray selfishly sometimes.  I want to feel God and I want to know He still loves me.  I do not think there is anything wrong with enjoying God's presence, but so many of our worship experiences are designed to get us to feel God's love and feel God's presence.  We want to feel the love of God explode (Kim Walker, anyone?) in our lives.  I think my flesh, our flesh, can tempt us to make reading the Bible and worship about our own experience.  How many times have we said or heard others say, "The worship didn't really do anything for me."  It's crazy to think that we might feel that the worship is about us.  It shouldn't do anything for us because the worship is not about us.  I've so closed tied emotions to experiencing God that absence of emotion in my faith suggests that God isn't involved.  That's dangerous.
3. Satan and spiritual forces of darkness are always warring against us, telling us lies and ensuring that our relationship with God is based upon anything but the Scriptures.  He knows the Bible is truth and that prayer conforms our hearts to God's image so he'll do anything to ensure we don't read the Bible and that we don't pray.

God is the ultimate source of all things good.  Any type of pleasantry is rooted in the benevolence of God.  Even the ability to feel is a blessing extended by God, granted when He created humanity in His perfect image.  The fluidity of human emotion, our ability to vacillate and experience all the sensations between bliss and rage, is a reflection of our infinitely emotional and compassionate Creator God.  Yet it is a sin to pursue the positivity that accompanies knowing God.  When we elevate feelings of peace and pursue an evangelical version of the Buddhist nirvana rather than seeking the actual Source of all love and goodness, we have created an idol of emotional experience.  We must obey the Scriptures, worship God and seek first His Kingdom despite our feelings.  If we question whether our prayers are heard or if obedience is fruitful for our spirits because we do not emotionally identify with the spoken prayer or the Scriptures at hand, we will see how the heart is truly deceitful above all things.  We do not obey the Scriptures or pray because we feel that doing so is a novel idea or because we think it is good for us.  These are selfish ambitions.  Rather we obey the Scripture because the Author and Finisher of our Faith, the penman of divine truths, has told us to because it glorifies His Name.  When our obedience and our worship is even partly motivated by our own desire for personal emotional balance or "doing something good" for ourselves, we are not fully submitted to God.  When we examine our motives in the absolute pure light of God's jealous demand for our undivided worship, we recognize that sin has cursed us more deeply than we ever understood.  How much more thankful we are for Christ when we see that we cannot worship God without thinking of ourselves!

 The key points here?

• Our faith cannot be based upon our feelings or experiences, but on the truth of the Scriptures.
• Our feelings and experiences can enhance our faith, but they can also be misleading and destructive.
• All of our feelings ought to be examined and held to the light of God's truth.
• Any feelings that steer us away from God instead of towards Him must be confronted and dealt with.
• Pursuing good feelings instead of pursuing a good God is a bad idea.

I've been writing about this for more than two hours now, so I think it's time for me to take a break.  I know this isn't a cute "Chicken Soup for the Soul" style story with a nice moral at the end, but it's the true story of my innermost thoughts and concerns regarding my walk with God.  There's no truer story for my life at this moment than what I've shared with you today.

I'm struggling. What the heck is ministry anyway?

sodahead.com

I am sitting in the Starbucks section of the Fairfield University Bookstore, drinking a low fat caramel frap and a turkey bacon, egg white and cheddar cheese breakfast sandwich.  It took me about 40 minutes to determine where I wanted to eat this morning.  After a short shift on the ambulance and a few hours before my next appointment, I need to kill time.  I went to the gym, realized that I left my sneakers at home, looked down at my duty boots and thought, "I'll have to go to the gym later."  So what do people do who struggle to live healthily when they forget their gym gear?  They go out to eat.  Thus, here I am.

I'm sitting next to a man who seems not to be too mentally stable.  He talks to himself, he's wearing a hospital bracelet and has a backpack full of prescription medications.  Then again, I'm the guy in Starbucks with military pants, tactical boots, a uniform shirt with a badge and a paracord bracelet in case I need to apply a tourniquet to my frap to stop it from leaking.  The insane man, who hopefully will not read my blog, is reading his Bible while I type away on my laptop.  He actually looks interested in the book.  I read a few verses and think I've done some good devotional work and go blog about it.  He sits here and reads the thing like it's a novel.  I'm more faithful to the biography of Abraham Lincoln I'm reading than to my Bible reading.

I've been evaluating my life quietly in my mind for a little bit now (the guy next to me does this aloud).  My pastor and I were chatting a few weeks ago and he told me, "Don't feel badly for thinking that you're not doing ministry.  You've been adjusting to a new life, a new job, and working in fields that require you to help people."  I still feel badly.  I read these loosey goosey "progressive" justice books about Jesus and I feel like doing anything nice now is ministry.  I mean, seriously, I talk to the clerk at Stop and Shop and I think I'm "being Jesus" to that woman. I ask a waiter how his day is going and I think that might have been a "Holy Spirit encounter."  I mean, really?  That's not fullness of life, that's just common decency.  Even Satan can be nice to the clerk.  Basically, I feel like I'm being lazy.  I could blog more, but that's so selfish, you know?  People read my stuff, they say "Oh I love your blog" and then I'm all like "thanks."  Yeah, I'm really suffering for Jesus.

The American mode of evangelism is changing though.  We are evolving from a "crusade" and "come to the altar" type of evangelism to an interpersonal relationship evangelism.  We follow the Holy Spirit's guidance and direction as to how we are to share our love for Jesus with others.  Sometimes that means sharing the Gospel full out and sometimes that means just being really gentle and loving with someone.  I'm learning that rather than force feeding Jesus to people, the Holy Spirit will actually reveal exactly what needs to be done or said at an exact moment to push that person on his or her journey towards Jesus.  I have been trying to follow the Holy Spirit on this new way of witnessing and as I reflect, I've had very natural Gospel based conversations in the past few weeks with those who don't believe.

My stream of consciousness blog is helping me reach a conclusion.  I think that showing up at a weekly meeting or appointment or attending a monthly event or outreach helps us feel that our lives have "ministry."  And sure, these scheduled events might be wonderful.  What about the rest of our lives though?  And because my schedule does not permit me regular meetings and doing cool events where I get a free t-shirt that tells people when my church meets, I feel like I am not doing anything for Jesus.  I think I have to redefine ministry then.  By our traditional definition of ministry my life has none, yet it has a lot of Jesus.  My life has no church events (except regular weekly attendance), but it has prayer and Bible readings (even though I'm not always excited to crack open the big book).  I don't wear a church t-shirt or have a bumper sticker that says that "Jesus is my co-pilot" (which makes no sense theologically by the way), but I wear a uniform with a badge and I answer and respond to emergency calls for a living, putting me in contact with the "least of these" more than Christian concerts do.  My life has no ministry and I feel awful about it, but I don't feel far from Jesus or like a lost sheep who needs to be brought home to the other 99.

People tell me that my ministry is "outside of the box," but what is the box?  Is the box the problem?  Is the box the reason why Islam is the fasting growing religion worldwide and the center of Christianity is now Africa, where there are more miracles happening now than in all of American history?  How do I address this crisis within my mind that I am not serving God because I am not doing typical ministry things but at the same time I want to serve others and really love people in different ways?  I feel like I'm not doing enough because I'm not really suffering, not really feeling that I've lost everything for the sake of the Kingdom.  In fact, I've gained.  I've got a solid job, a wonderful girlfriend, I'm healthier than I've been in years and well, I look good bald (joking...).  How do I reconcile "out of the box" ministry with the Gospel and with the American mold of ministry and evangelism?

I can't (nor do I want to) redefine the Gospel.  I can't undo my calling to serve others in unique ways and "to love the unlovable" as God has shared with me directly and through others to do.  Therefore, I have to redefine ministry and evangelism.  Yeah, that's not a daunting task (note sarcasm).  I guess that is the adventure though, right?

My conservative friends think I'm too liberal and I need to go before the altar to tarry and wait for a specific "inside the church office" calling (because that is the only place where God is moving) while my liberal friends think I'm too conservative and that I just need to drink with the drunks to really relate.  I think they're both nuts.  This is my true story.  It's politcally incorrect, religiously incorrect, and possibly grammatically correct.  It's my life though.  And I'm thankful for it.  True story.