Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)
While the first example was best seen in the Prosperity Gospel, a high reliance on emotion and experience can be best seen with the Charismatic Movement. Charismatics can take on many forms, but the general experience involves a regular use of supernatural gifts (healing, speaking in tongues, and prophecy), and the events are often quite emotional.
Within this belief system, many people base their entire faith in Jesus Christ on one of two things: an experience they’ve had (or regularly have) or how Jesus makes them feel. Supernatural gifts are not only pursued, but using them is considered a baseline requirement to show you truly have the Holy Spirit. Many services consist of high emotion that leaves the participants drained and feeling like they’ve truly had an encounter with God. The strength of their faith is proportionate to what they experience or how emotionally close they feel to God.
Once again, being honest with ourselves can reveal this reliance on experience and emotion in our own hearts as well.
Our reliance on experience
Using experience as the basis of faith can take on different forms. Some people make judgments on God’s character based on their life experiences – God is good because good things happen to them, or God is a monster because of something terrible they’ve experienced. Others may base it on their day-to-day experiences, feeling that God is closer to them when they’ve had their morning Bible routine, or feeling like He’s distant or further from their mind if they skip it.
Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with experience supporting out faith. After all, Israel regularly built altars to remind them of times when God acted in an incredible way. God Himself calls them to use their experience to remember the glory of God.
However, the problem comes when we need those experiences to know who God is. The farther we get from God moving in a big way in our lives, the less passion and surrender we feel for Him. When God carries us through the death of a loved one or provides for us when we financially struggle, our praise and worship of Him are high. Yet when things are more mundane and we don’t get those big “God moments,” we easily go back to living for ourselves.
Experience is a dangerous thing to rely on because it acts like a drug. When we’ve had a moment where God felt so near and real to us, it can be difficult to encounter the rest of life without that moment. And like a drug user, we’ll go to almost any length to experience it again. We’ll listen to increasingly-emotional music, read books that let us experience God through others (like books about people going to Heaven), go to more exciting churches, and do anything we can to chase that “high” we want to feel for God.
Unfortunately, such experiences are like a microwave. An emotional song, a moment of overwhelming sorrow over our sin, or praying in tongues may elevate us to dizzying heights and make God’s presence seem so near, but they only last for the moments we’re in them. They keep us warm for a time, but we quickly cool off and continue on until the next time.
Worse, we may experience a crisis when we either stop experiencing such moments, or we become numb to them. We may question our very salvation because we lack the only thing we based our faith on. If we aren’t excited for God, crying at church, or feeling refreshed from our Bible reading… are we truly saved?
That’s the danger of relying on experience. Rather than God’s word telling us who He is and who we are in Christ, we let our truth be determined by what happens to us. From there, we so easily care more about how the experience makes us feel, rather than who it is we’re experiencing.
Our reliance on emotion
This one is closely tied to experience in so many ways. Experience often determines how we feel – we want to feel good, or happy, or overwhelmed with what we think is love or God’s presence, and so we seek things that help us generate those emotions. The emotional music, the feeling of people around us crying, dancing, or shouting for joy… all of these experiences feed our emotion.
However, emotion also carries its own dangers.
A common danger is when we use Christ to fuel our emotions as though He’s a motivational poster. How many people try to get psyched for a sports game or job interview by quoting Philippians 4:13? How many people get excited about blessings they expect to receive by clinging to Jeremiah 29:11?
The problem, of course, is that Christ isn’t our life coach. He isn’t there to pump us up and make us the best version of ourselves. He isn’t a way to get motivated because He is our motivation.
We are slaves to righteousness, serving our king. Yet when our arrogance takes over, we push Christ to the background and treat Him like an equal. We think and live as though Christ died on the cross so we don’t have to be unhappy. He’s our Savior, yes, but we only want Him to save us from failure, not the price of our sin and the weakness of our flesh.
With that in mind, we may also treat Christ like an emotional support animal. We approach prayer and Bible reading with an emphasis on ourselves – we are in need, we need help, we want to be rescued from our circumstances. We approach God with one goal in mind – to feel better.
As we read the Psalms, and listen to the words of Christ, there’s certainly nothing wrong with wanting the peace and comfort of the Savior. Once again, it comes down to what we’re emphasizing – do we need God because we’re nothing without Him, or because He’s our means of getting what we truly want?
The greatest danger of emotion, however, is how easily it becomes our basis for truth.
- My God would never call for all the murder and destruction we see in the Old Testament
- God would never be angry about who I choose to love
- Why would Jesus want me to be unhappy in my marriage when I can marry this other person who does make me happy?
- How could God be real if there’s so much evil in the world?
- Why should I give up things I like? Or do things I don’t want to do?
How many generations of Christians have changed or swept aside parts of the Bible they’re uncomfortable with? How often do we compromise what God’s word teaches because we don’t’ like it? When we become slaves to our emotions, we try to force God to fit into a box that doesn’t make us feel bad about ourselves or what we need to do.
Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin. (James 4:17)
Sin itself is evidence of what happens when we let emotion be a higher authority than God and His word. When we say “I know I shouldn’t, but it’s too hard to resist,” what we’re really saying is “I know God doesn’t want me too, but I want to do it and so I will.” Our emotions so often want to follow our sin nature, rather than our Savior. And in every moment of sin, what we ultimately see is that we cared more about catering to our emotion than submitting to Christ.
Taken too far, we start to realize that we don’t want a Jesus who wants us to deny ourselves of pleasure. We want the Jesus who says “Judge not” and came to Earth to take away our guilty feelings.
We don’t want Jesus… we just want whoever will make us feel better about our sin.
Summarizing the danger of experience and emotion
While the Charismatic Movement is built on using Jesus to feed our need for high emotion and big experiences, those outside of it are no less guilty of using Christ to serve ourselves.
“An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign; and a sign will not be given it, except the sign of Jonah.” And He left them and went away. (Matthew 16:4)
For indeed Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; 23 but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, (1 Corinthians 1:22-23)
Ultimately, what we end up doing is putting God on trial. We say to Him “You’re only real, and you’re only worth following, if you meet my demands. The Bible isn’t enough – I need to feel a certain way before I’ll trust you.” We put our truth above God, only worshipping a version of Him that meets our needs.
Herod didn’t want Jesus, just an experience. The crowds didn’t want a God who called them to holiness and repentance, but instead just wanted a guy to fill their needs.
We read about them with pity, yet we easily fall into the same trap. We want Christ because He gives us big, emotional experiences or makes us feel special or unique. We want the emotional music or the miraculous signs, and our entire faith can become based on receiving those things. If one day we never saw a sign or felt the goosebumps of overwhelming emotion, we’d have nothing left to sustain us. We would walk away from the faith and find something else, because all we really wanted was someone to dance for us and give us what we wanted.
As a result of this many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him anymore. So Jesus said to the twelve, “You do not want to go away also, do you?” Simon Peter answered Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life. We have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God.” (John 6:66-69)
None of us are immune to using Christ for our own gain. We aren’t so righteous that we will never forget our place. However, God is gracious and merciful, even in our weakest moments.
Even when we’re weak and lacking faith, we can remember who Jesus Christ is. We can go to Him in our brokenness, knowing He loves us and wants to draw us closer to Him. We don’t need Him to jump through hoops to live for Him. We don’t need to rely on emotion or experience to know what truth is.
All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. (2 Timothy 3:16-17)
Jesus Christ is truth. His word was given to us so that we could not only know Him, but know everything we need for life and godliness. Experiences only last for a moment. Emotions are unreliable and unpredictable. But the world of God is not only reliable, but timeless. What was true in the days of Paul is still true for us today. Because of that, we can trust Christ, even if our experiences and emotions seem to disagree.
Remember those who led you, who spoke the word of God to you; and considering the result of their conduct, imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Do not be carried away by varied and strange teachings; for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by foods, through which those who were so occupied were not benefited. (Hebrews 13:7-9)
[Ready to dig deeper? Learn more about faith in my 5-part series called “Biblical Faith vs. Modern Faith,” or learn about what the Bible truly means when it talks about loving God with all our hearts with “Let’s Talk About Your Heart.”]
