12. I deeply enjoy the moments when I feel God’s loving presence, but the feelings happen less now than before.
Where do you find yourself in this description of how feelings function in our relationship with God?
Have you ever felt that God stopped loving you or stopped giving you feelings of His love? If so, how have you processed that?
Are you aware of times when Satan used feelings to disrupt your relationship with God? If so, what feelings does Satan most often use to confuse you?
What gives you confidence to trust that God is speaking to you through your feelings?
Our feelings are a very important part of our life with God. A healthy spiritual journey will include a process of learning how to integrate our emotions into our life with God.
A typical spiritual journey often includes the following seasons of experiencing feelings:
No feelings, dependence on thoughts.
Exploring feelings, learning to discern feelings.
Embracing feelings, experiencing feelings, attachment to feelings.
Letting go of “body feelings” as you learn to experience “deep feelings” and “heart feelings.”
Let’s explore these. In the early phase of our spiritual journey we often focus on thoughts, information, and beliefs. We may be told not to trust our feelings. Feelings often are treated with suspicion because feelings can lead to poor decisions. But in a relationship, feelings are important.
As we grow in our relationship with Jesus, we must learn how to appropriately incorporate our feelings. As we begin to practice using our feelings, we find that we are vulnerable to feelings that are damaging to our relationship with Jesus, feelings like fear, guilt, shame, pride, envy, etc. These feelings do not come from God but are emotions the enemy uses to distract us from Him.
It is essential in this phase of our journey to learn to discern which feelings are truly God’s voice to us and which are Satan’s. As we learn to notice God’s voice in our feelings, we can experience a rich season in our spiritual journey. This is a season in which Jesus becomes very real to us. We experience being deeply loved by God along with feelings of joy, freedom, peace, and satisfaction. These feelings are typically sensations in our bodies that are given to us by God.
The richness of this season creates its own problems, though. We can become so attached to these feelings that we desire the feelings of God more than the God of our feelings. As this happens, we may find that God begins to withhold those feelings in order to help us move onward in our spiritual journey.
As God withdraws these sensory experiences, we may feel He has abandoned us or that have offended Him, having done something wrong and failed in some way. It is in this transition that Satan again moves in to try and disrupt us with feelings of false guilt and shame. But God is not upset with us. Rather,
He is rewarding our faithfulness with something better, a new and better way in our relationship. In this new phase, we let go of unhealthy attachment to body feelings and find a deeper way of being with God, one that is difficult to explain but we know it when we find it. It can be described as a deep awareness of God, a sense of His presence, a confident knowing of the reality of God and the reality of the relationship we share with God.
It is an experience of love without physical “touch,” a quiet resting in God. In the early phases of our spiritual journey we experience God in our thoughts, we then move into knowing God through the senses of our body, but in this later season we connect with God through our hearts.
This heart-season is no less real or intimate. Actually, it is a more mature, faith-filled, trusting. It is characterized by a deep love and longing for God and an awareness of being deeply loved and cherished by God.