The way I see it, you’re being too hard on yourself, as well as being too easy on yourself.
You’re emotional, so you think that something must be wrong because Christian life does not feel good, or that you don’t feel passion or zeal in trying to live out Christian life or in Christian service.
I would argue that it’s okay not to feel it, heck, even if you never feel it for 50 years, and even for a million years. Because Christian life is not going to satisfy, just like nothing in this world could ever satisfy, for we were made for another world, and only the divine accolade of well done good and faithful servant will give us what we truly desire – acceptance by our God and to be pleasing to our Heavenly Father as his children.
That’s just Christian life – you’re being too emotionally hard on yourself if you think you need to feel it in order to genuinely believe. To genuinely believe you neeed to, in some sense, not care about feeling it. You believe because you have reasons for believing it’s true, no matter how enticing the world feels and how it feels better than the tools and stress of giving it your all for Christian life.
And on the other hand, you better make sure you don’t make it too easy on yourself. When it comes to serving, it’s fine to do it without feeling like you want to do it yet, and do it only because you intellectually know the feelings won’t come until after you obey. But when it comes to being saved, you know you need to get there eventually.
The heart, and feelings of what the heart wants, are what matter in the end. We take actions each and every day that shape our hearts and help us practice the way we want our heart to be. If we fill our hearts with the things of God, selflessness, humility, surrender, sacrifice, love, suffering, then we understand the heart of God and we will enjoy Him and Heaven when we get there.
However, if we are pulled by the things of this world and it’s fleeting pleasures, we mistake these false pleasures as substitutes for the real thing, the real joy that comes with losing your life to save it as we seek to save our lives like all our non-Christian brethren. We become tricked and believe in lies like all the rest. Wanting a piece of land to call our own, our own time, energies, wanting luxury cars or leisure activities, going out to eat, relax, Netflix and chill, movies, books, to do the same as our coworkers, go bike riding for 6 days, drink espressos, go on vacations, and pursue money to keep up that lifestyle – at some point there needs to be a choice not to conform to the ways of the world.
Because if our desires are not transformed, then heaven will not be heaven, we’ll still be separated from God and eternal goodness and Jesus would say i never knew you. The things I just mentioned, they are earthly and less than God, so it makes sense that Heaven would not have things that require money, for instance, or video games or tv shows or biking. So if you train your heart to indulge your selfish desire for these things of the world, you’ll feel tortured by the fact that your heart can’t get these things in
heaven.
On the other hand, if you have God, you get all these things thrown in – with God, there is more, not less of the life we enjoy. The feelings of wanting a piece of land to call our own is no longer necessary – we know there is no such land as all is under the purview of the Lord and we rightly enjoy what the Lord enjoys, the proper consumption of our desires as Lewis might put it, and we experience true freedom as a result, similar but better than the person who gets to live out the lifestyle they wanted on earth.
We only want our own time because we know on earth there is death – in heaven there is not. On earth time is precious, in heaven you have an eternity of it. So there’s no longer a desire or competition between the things of God and the good things that are not God. In heaven, we can have both, as the time we want for ourselves is given us by God. We only wanted to feed ourselves and our selfish desires because we believed the world was finite – we can be selfless we when we affirm the reality that it is infinite. Scarcity and fear of death is what motivates us here on earth, and it’s what motivates others to pursue selfish desires over self-less was with God.
Digression:
Herein lies the problem – you can take the man out of slavery, but not the slavery out of man. If you train your heart on earth to be enslaved to needing this lifestyle, enslaved to the need to feed yourself because you’re enslaved by fear of your own death and the scarcity of your time, then you’ll still be sadly insular even when there’s an eternity I reality – you wont believe the promises of the Lord and seek to want to world instead of God. God will say to you, thy will be done, and it will be so – God will leave you alone and you will have what you pursued and wanted. You’ll be forever cut off from divine life because you’ll be stuck wanting only things that are if this world. Heaven will simply feel like a place that takes you away from what you want, so it’ll feel like hell.
Luxury cars only feel like a luxury because it costs a limited resource, money. It wouldn’t be luxury if everyone could afford it, and people only want it because it’s hard to get and ppl pursue hard to get things because they think it’s worth the resources, so they pursue their career to get the money to buy the things they think they need, things that require effort because it’s only luxury because other ppl don’t have it.
Same with leisure activities, going out to eat. Good things, but might train us to think we are the most important things in the universe, and in our failure to spend time on people by spending it on ourselves, we fail to love and therefore fail to shape our hearts and fault to please God, instead training our hearts to possibly be deceived by this world and it’s pleasures being all that there is to look forward to.
Where each next thrill can be found in the next episode people create, and we mistake pleasure as coming from the story written by the authors and fail to see it’s from the resonance of their words with ourselves and the God who made us. And we pursue money as our God who makes all these things possible.
Where we do things like them with our time, and forget that we are like Him and our time is ultimately his.
Those are not bad things, but if we are not careful they can become idols that we mistake for the real thing. That’s why the warning is there, because the heart and the intentions of the heart carried over in the eternity of the soul are the only things that matter in the end.
So beware and be vigilant and hard on yourself in this way – you don’t need to always have the right feelings and the desire to live out Christian life, but you do need to feel what God feels about this life being fleeting in order to be saved into a heaven worth attaining. That’s why there’s always the risk of Jesus saying well done good and faithful servant as well as I never knew you – it’s by grace for those who believe in Jesus for eternal life, Jesus who said lose your life to save it.
If you don’t live out this calling and instead try to live a more “balanced life” with more of the world, you run the risk of the world enslaving your heart. Or more accurately, if you go to a church that is more lukewarm and less commitment, you might be more swayed by the lies of the world as you’re surrounded by others who might be the same. Not necessarily though – there are many churches with less commitment but might still have zealous believers – it’s not up to me to judge their heart; only the Lord can do that. I simply judge their actions – some obvious red flags are those who pursue a jet-setting lifestyle where money is more important than the things of God, but pursuit of money could also be used to gain eternal friends. So it depends on the heart and intention of the heart, which only God can judge in the end.
Which is why i stay at this church. I want a church that is the most motivating, the most willing to curb my heart and desires for this world – I want a coach that is the most committed to me achieving my goals, and my goal is Christ, and to enjoy Him when I get there. It’s a life where I fully embrace reality – life is short, eternity is long, so live for heaven. I stay at the church where so feel like so can die to myself the most, that is, in accordance to the amount of faith I have – I don’t have the faith to be a missionary in Muslim countries yet for instance. But I have enough to want to want to stay at this church which helps me grow and with like-minded believers who also see reality the same about the fleeting joys in this world, and the eternal joys in the next. And I am surrounded by people committed to give this reality to others, to see the world as harassed and helpless and to have compassion on them – to see that I want to be a part of that mission. That is the life I want for myself, and it’s the life I want for others. That is wanting Jesus for Jesus, wanting Jesus even if I give up the things of this life to give up what I cannot keep to gain what I cannot lose.
So, think of it that way. Do you see others in this way? If you do, then you’ll have to see yourself this way. If not, then you’ll have to question what exactly you believe about Jesus, and whether or not you believe His words and commandments as things you want to live out in your life. Thankfully, we don’t have to do it alone and we are part of a church committed to giving it our all to do exactly that. Why would I want a less committed church if that’s the risk to my heart? I’d want the most commitment, again, in measure to the amount of faith I have, and the heart I know so have and the amount of sway I know the world holds over me and the amount of convictions i hold to fight that limping between two opinions.
But that’s not how it starts. You’re not limping between the things of the world and the things of God – you’re being too hard on yourself. This is what Christian life looks like, to do things even when you don’t feel like it, and what you’re really limping between is serving God and deriving pleasure from it, or serving God without feeling like you want to do it. You can keep walking and limping between these opinions for as long as it takes – indeed, you’ll have to if you are to attain heaven and the Lord and enjoy it when you get there.
The limping that the Bible teaches us to avoid is the first, the limping we can’t avoid is the second.
As a mental exercise – imagine you got into heaven, but your best friend that you grew up with for years seems to still be rebellious and is not surrendering their life to Christ. Would you be willing to trade places with that friend, and give up your ticket to heaven?
Would you be willing to be like Jesus – give up heaven for the sake of the otherwise damned?
I think for all who claim to want to go to heaven, and for those who reach it, they probably feel similar sentiments. Most likely, a situation like Abraham and Issac would occur – God would say, wait wait, don’t give up your son, now that I know your heart is willing to do even this, then you truly have the same heart of God. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son so that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
That’s the God we strive to be like, and the mental exercise suggests we must give up heaven if we are to truly love God for God and not for what he can do for us.
For those who follow Jesus simply because they’re afraid of death – realize that in the end the Lord demands you die to oneself and be willing to give up, not really give up, just like Abraham was willing to give up his son, not really giving him up in the end, to do all that with giving up even eternal life for the sake of the lost.
Kind of complicated, right? Kind of difficult? That’s what we’re called to, and it’s right. So yes, although we are completely saved by grace, Jesus himself is the condition by which we are saved, it’s not baseless grace. We need to believe in Jesus, the man who said these things, died for these things, and rose to conquer all things, if we are to be saved: question is, do you believe in these words of Jesus?
There’s a reason why the road is wide that leads to destruction and those who are saved enter by the narrow gate, and why it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven – he has too much he must be willing to leave behind. That’s why we must lose our lives to save it, and those who save their life will lose it. That is the life-long challenge and the condition by which we are saved through Christ. It’s hard work to train our hearts, though the opportunity comes solely through the grace of God. Not all those who are of Israel are Israel. There are those who receive the grace of God to whom Jesus says I never knew you.
So it’s a lot – to leave behind the things of this world and the things that others pursue. But, the promises of scripture are that we’ll get to keep the good parts of what this earth has to offer, and that God simply wants to see our hearts, as God wanted to see Abraham’s heart, and wanted Abraham to train his heart.
Now that I think about it – that’s the same issue with calvinism – they think salvation is by grace, which they equate to without man’s effort, but even God said the condition is that we must believe in Jesus to have eternal life, and it takes effort to believe that truth, the words of our Lord in the midst of such lies. That effort, that art of holding on to what you have reasons to believe to be true, is what we call having faith, and without faith it is impossible to please God, so we must exert effort to keep faith – it’s not without effort. That’s where Calvinism gets it wrong – in fear of too much effort and too little dependence on God’s grace which saves, they neglect the necessity of surrender, which is an effortful attempt of submission and sacrifice even though the world teaches us not to. It is a choice to give up choice, and we must choose that in order to be truly saved.
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish 