How do you think the Almighty would feel if you said, “God, I want you to prove to me that you’re not a liar when you say over and over in your Word that you love me.” We’d never put it so bluntly, but regardless of whether we seek a feeling or supernatural skywriting, this is really what is going on when we seek a sign from God that he loves us.
Expecting a sign plunges us into a no-win situation. To explain, permit me to draw upon something I wrote elsewhere:
You are sure to unconsciously keep your emotions in check when relating to God if you fear he could have a cruel streak. No normal person would feel secure about giving his or her heart to someone who might possibly be callous, or even sneak some twisted pleasure out of slaughtering innocents, or tormenting people in hell, or in any other way have less than the highest conceivable morality.
To be more tenderhearted than any human; to love more than life itself both hate-crazed rapists and their innocent victims, is to live on an emotional nuclear bomb. Nevertheless, this is the agonizingly heart-wrenching place where God lives. To be the God of perfect justice, and yet merciful and forgiving, is to live on a knife-edge that demands terrifyingly stupendous wisdom. If you, in your wildest dreams, suppose you could do better that the God of perfection, it is because in this infinitesimal fragment of eternity, you know only a fraction of the facts and the final destinies of those involved.
The Lord could have stripped us all of our dignity and freedom of choice, enslaving humanity so that it is impossible for any of us to make wrong decisions and hurt people. Yes, such iron control would remove evil, but it would also remove all good. If robbed of choice, every human action would be reduced to moral neutrality. We could never know the joyous fulfillment and honor of having chosen correctly.
You cannot congratulate a robot. Only its maker could be honored. God wants not machines but children – dignified beings who can be honored. For us to have the ability to make praiseworthy decisions, we must also be granted the ability to make blameworthy decisions. To be destined to rule as royalty with God for all eternity necessitates the freedom to make horrific mistakes. Love does not enslave; it sets free.
God is love, and love takes enormous risks, because there is no other way to love. “If you love something, set it free; if it comes back it’s yours, if it doesn’t, it never was,” Richard Bach. This principle is the driving force behind all that God does.
God is good. He is perfect in all his ways. He is infinitely trustworthy.
If we confuse circumstances with God’s favor, we are bound to suffer bouts of feeling unloved. Until we understand the heart of God and his plans for us, there is little that is more likely to crush our ability to feel loved than when God seems to be blessing others more than us.
Let’s examine the reasons why it is so common for us to mistakenly think God has favorites. (If you don’t require all the detail provided in this section, feel free to just skim through it.)
Not Seeing the Big Picture
One of Jesus’ most chilling expressions was, “they have received their reward in full” (Matthew 6:2,5,16). Despite seeming blessed of God, their current satisfaction, smugness or “fifteen minutes of fame” is all they will ever get. .
There are those who by missing out down here are storing up treasure in heaven and there are those who are the envy of people down here, but will live in eternal regret. “What is highly valued among men is detestable in God’s sight” (Luke 16:15).
To illustrate, Jesus compared Lazarus, a diseased, despised beggar, with a hard-hearted rich man, who seemed to be basking in God’s blessing. For all eternity, their situations will be reversed (Luke 16:19-26). Another time, Jesus told of the farmer who seemed so divinely favored that he had to build bigger barns to store all his wealth, but his riches were of no consequence because he would die and his bumper harvests were the only “blessing” he would ever receive (Luke 12:16-21).
So what matters is not current circumstances – whether our own of those of other people. Over and over, Jesus taught that everyone’s existence takes an astounding twist; a terrifying or heart-stoppingly thrilling reversal of fortune, in the next life. The proud will be humbled. The humble will be exalted. The first will end up last. The meek will inherit the earth. Jesus revealed that at the end of the age, when the “sheep” are separated from the “goats,” both classes of people will be shocked. Neither had imagined the stupendous and eternal implications of their seemingly minor decisions (Matthew 25:31-46). He spoke of three servants entrusted with money. Two worked hard, one had a life of ease, but the day of reckoning came (Matthew 25:14-30).
Jesus’ own life highlights the great reversal. He went from the cross to the throne; from earthly shame to eternal glory; from apparent rejection from God to being exalted by him. The final twist was staggering. And he told us to take up our cross and follow him on this astounding journey.
In the short term, the ungodly can indeed prosper and, like Jesus, God’s children can get a raw deal. It is vital that we focus on the eternal, not current “blessings.” When we confuse the two, everything slips out of focus and we will wrongly think God is overlooking us.
Blessed are the poor, the meek, the persecuted, said Jesus. There are Christians who will spend all eternity rejoicing in the blessing of having on earth suffered severe persecution and defamation. And there are Christians who will suffer eternal loss, as if a fire had ripped through their home, destroying everything they owned (1 Corinthians 3:11-15).
Seasons in God
Job crashed from prosperity to poverty, from health to sickness and from a large, happy family to devastating grief. Throughout it all there was not the slightest fluctuation in God’s love for him. Joseph went from being the pampered, favorite son, to being a slave, then branded a rapist and incarcerated as a criminal and finally exalted to political power, fame and fortune – all without any change in God’s attitude to him. David moved from shepherd boy to giant killer, to King’s son-in-law, to fugitive, to King – with God being proud of him the whole time.
We could talk of Elijah, who slid from mountain top, to depression, to spectacular entry to heaven. Or we could burst out of the Old Testament into the New, and see the mightily blessed apostle Paul often having not even enough to eat (Scriptures), suffering horrific beatings, unjust prison sentences, pounded by natural disasters (snake bite, several ship wrecks, and so on) and God refusing to answer his prayers (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). On and on we could go, showing from God’s revelation to humanity (the Bible) that changing fortunes need not indicate changes in God’s favor.
To always be in fruit would kill a tree. As trees cycle from dormancy, to blossom, to fruitfulness, to loss and dormancy, without fluctuations in God’s blessing, so people basking in God’s blessing have seasons of growth and fruitfulness and seasons of loss, dryness and barrenness. The main difference between spiritual seasons and natural seasons is that nature moves in unison, whereas at any one time, different Christians in the same locality will be in different spiritual seasons. Some people will be over the moon, pampered with spiritual goose bumps, like John when receiving his revelation. Others will be languishing in the midst of an oppressive trial, like John was, as a prisoner on Patmos, when his vision commenced (Revelation 1:9). It would be a grave misunderstanding to think this means some have God’s favor and some do not, or to think you have fallen out of God’s love and blessing, when it is simply a change of season.
As I have said elsewhere:
If spring could tip-toe past nature without stirring it from its winter slumber; if the sun could slip through the sky without dispelling the night; if rain could fall to the ground without bringing life to the desert – only then should you fear dry times, dark times, lean times.
You might be envious of the Apostle Paul, thinking you would feel so loved of God if the Lord had appeared to you in blinding light as he did to Paul. But would you feel loved of God if, like Paul, you reeled from one catastrophe to another – shipwreck after shipwreck, years languishing in prison, religious leaders wanting him dead, forsaken by Christians (Scriptures) and so on?
Living in Unnecessary Spiritual Poverty
In Jesus’ famous parable, the prodigal son’s brother was jealous of the father’s extravagant display of love for the wayward son. “You’ve thrown a party, slaughtering the fatted calf for this no-hoper, when you haven’t given me so much as a little goat!” he complained bitterly.
The father’s reply is staggering: “Son, all that I have has always been yours for the taking” (Luke 15:29-31, my paraphrase).
This brother had been waiting for the father to give him things; never having sufficiently believed in his father’s love and generosity to have realized that he could have helped himself to everything.
Some people help themselves to God’s blessings, simply because they choose to believe the Bible when it says that God is love, does not show favoritism (Scriptures), that he has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ (Ephesians 1:3), and so on. Others miss out, not because they are any less loved, or that God doesn’t want them to have it, but simply because they fail to take God at his word.
Different Callings
The Scriptures reveal that Christians differ so greatly from each other that they are like totally different bodily organs. Some of us are like eyes – spiritually perceptive but delicate and useless for carrying anything. Some are like arms – strong and useful but can sense very little. Being destined to fulfill different roles in the body of Christ means that some people will be more spiritually perceptive than others, not because God is moving more powerfully in their lives, and certainly not because they are more loved of God, but simply because they are called to perform a different function in the body than other parts.
Just as everyone sees your nose and no one sees your kidneys, some parts of Christ’s body will, of necessity, be more noticed than others. Again, this is solely because of their function. Prominence in the body does not in the slightest mean prominence in the heart of God. In fact, as Scripture points out, God has ordained that those parts of the body that get all the attention – such as our hair – are actually less important than parts that are out of sight (Scripture).
Personality Types
Some people’s personality cause them to regularly soar and plunge from dizzy peaks to darkened valleys, while certain individuals have moods that barely change from one day or week to the next. Those of us whose personality type keeps our emotions on a steady course can end up feeling inferior – and feel less loved by God – simply because we have never had the highs of those Christians who suffer great highs are lows. On the other hand, people whose personality takes them on an emotional roller coaster, instead of realizing the uniqueness of their highs, often feel inferior because Christians who rarely suffer such lows because their emotional journey is much flatter.
Especially because too few Christians are brutally honest about their down times, the spiritual grass always seems greener in someone else’s life.
We might be envious of Elijah when God was working miracles through him, but none of us envy him when he was in the pits of depression wishing he were dead (1 Kings 19:4).
Poetic License?
Yet another complicating factor is that what happens inside of us is virtually indescribable. Some people are so poetic in their attempts to describe their feelings that even if those hearing the description had the identical experience, they wouldn’t recognize it and would still feel envious.
So comparing our own spiritual journey with what we know of that of other Christians is strewn with spiritual danger. To quote myself again:
Eleven thousand teachers competed with Christa McAuliffe and lost. The winner of a seat on space shuttle Challenger was the envy of millions – until the shuttle disintegrated soon after take-off. Eleven thousand losers suddenly became winners.
In the twinkling of an eye, the first shall be last (1 Corinthians 15:52; Matthew 20:16; Luke 16:15) . Until that wondrous moment, don’t assume you’re a loser.
Despite God insisting in his Word that he loves each of us with all of his heart, we are all subject to many factors that give the upsetting illusion that others are more loved of God than us. No wonder faith is so critical to the Christian life. Without faith in the integrity of God’s word and his love, we will never see past the temporary and superficial, to the heart of God.
If God Loved Me He Wouldn’t Have . . .
It is hard to find anyone in Scripture of whom God is proud, who did not suffer what must have felt like endless times when it seemed to the untrained eye that God was acting unlovingly towards that person.
Over and over, Scripture praises Abraham for his faith, and yet he must surely have endured many times with the thought churning through in his mind, “If God really loved me he would have given me a son by now. I’m getting too old even to enjoy a child.”
I can well imagine Joseph thinking, “If God loved me, he wouldn’t have sold me into slavery.” Yet, after year upon year of setbacks, he ended up declaring to his brothers, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good . . .” (Genesis 50:20).
We are so much like children thinking, “If Daddy loved me he would have let me run on to the busy road, he’d let me play with matches, he wouldn’t insist I eat vegetables . . .” Other times, we are like athletes selected for Olympic glory, thinking that if the coach truly cared about us he wouldn’t set us grueling training sessions.
Every time I cannot see the love and wisdom behind God’s actions, I am displaying my ignorance and folly. To plunder other writings of mine:
Embraced by divine love, your life will be tinged with mystery but aglow with glory.
Tucked in the heart of Scripture sleeps a tiny psalm of precious truth (Psalm 131) . The singer confessed that as a mother denies her baby access to her milk when it’s time for her darling to be weaned, so God sometimes denies us things we crave. Yet as a weaned infant lies warm and secure in its mother’s bosom, our soul can nestle into God, not knowing why we have been denied that which we have clamored for, but content to draw love and comfort from the Father’s heart.
As the heavens soar far above us, high and unreachable, so is God’s wisdom (Isaiah 55:8-9; Psalm 139:6; 147:5; Romans 11:33-34; Job 11:7-9) . Our tiny minds may understand the Father’s ways no more than a babe understands its mother, yet still we can rest in him, bathed in the certainty that when the omnipotent, omniscient Lord lets the inexplicable touch a child of his, it is a manifestation of unfathomable love. In the hands of the One who wouldn’t so much as break a damaged reed or snuff a smoking wick, you are safe (Matthew 12:20).
Spiritual Blockages
Isaiah 59:1-2 Surely the arm of the LORD is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.
Psalm 66:18 If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened
The Lord is exceedingly tolerant of those who keep battling sin despite losing often. These are people who have yet to discover how to appropriate Christ’s victory into their lives, but as long as they keep seeking forgiveness and keep seeking victory, their falls are in an entirely different category to those who and have not the slightest intention of giving up willful sin. Those who abuse God’s grace by deliberately sinning without any genuine remorse are in grave spiritual danger and they can certainly expect this to end up seriously affecting their relationship with God.
Then there are those who have unrepentant sin in their lives and are unaware that God disapproves. At the end of this page is a link under Spiritual Blockages to the testimony a woman who suddenly found that God seemed distant. It turned out that this was the Lord’s way of getting her to seek him and to discover that there were matters (in her case, previous dabbling in the occult) God wanted her to repent of. Up until then, her Lord had tolerated this being in her past, but he decided that now was the time for her to learn that it is spiritually dangerous and to deal with it.
Wrap-Up
We all know about anorexia and how people – often women – can be attractive and yet be fooled by a cruel trick of the mind into being thoroughly convinced that they are repulsively overweight. This is not just a devastating delusion; it can kill.
There is something very similar that crushes marriages – women who are gorgeous in their husband’s eyes and yet feel so undesirable that they shrink from their husband’s advances. Not only do these women undergo needless distress, it cripples the entire relationship; greatly hindering, or even destroying, intimacy and lovemaking and the couple’s enjoyment of each other. The most distressing aspect of this tragedy is that all the suffering is completely needless because the husband is thrilled with his wife’s appearance, and yet this fact keeps bouncing off the woman. Either, despite all her husband’s pleas, she does not believe him, or she is so caught up in her own delusion that she allows her mistaken self-image to enslave her, rather than delighting in what she knows is her husband’s view of her. Either way, the husband reels in the pain of rejection and the frustration of seeing his beloved suffering and yet spurning all his efforts to convince her of how desirable she is.
An almost identical tragedy devastates relationships with God when much of the Lord’s delight in us is dismissed as a lie, merely because it does not match our feelings. Or the tragedy hits when we are so self-absorbed with our own feelings and distorted self-image that we have little interest in how thrilled God is with us.
The choice is ours. We can cave in to oppressive feelings, letting them bluff us into spoiling our relationship with God. Or we can press on, despite our feelings, and enter into the countless blessings God has for us.
Feelings not based on truth are as useless and dangerous as drug-induced highs. Truth depends on facts, not feelings. It’s facts, not feel-good delusions, that we need and it is precisely these critical, life-changing facts that the Bible deals with.
Chasing feelings is like chasing the end of rainbows. To be a feeling-junkie is to throw your life away, as surely as mainlining heroin. To stake your spiritual life on the integrity of God’s love and his Word, however, is to store up treasure in heaven, where the interest rates are out of this world.
Ridiculously old and childless, Abraham didn’t feel like he would end up a father of many nations. Scared and ill-quipped, Joshua, Gideon, young David and so many other heroes of the faith, didn’t feel like facing the enemy. Tired and discouraged by a fruitless night, Peter and his fishing partners didn’t feel like obeying Jesus and launching into the deep. Frail and outnumbered in a jostling crowd, the hemorrhaging woman didn’t feel like fighting through the throng to touch Jesus’ cloak. Sweating, as it were, drops of blood, Jesus didn’t feel like doing God’s will. Tortured time and again, the apostle Paul kept having to pray for the courage just to keep going (Ephesians 6:19-20; Philippians 1:20).
The entire Bible is bursting with people who didn’t feel like doing the very thing that made them heroes of the faith. They felt defeated and insignificant, but they kept on anyhow. They treated their feelings with as much disdain as pests. Like troublesome flies, unwanted feelings persist but heaven’s heroes press on regardless. They push through the doubt, fear and pain, and keep going despite everything within them screaming that it is hopeless. That’s the heart of a champion. And you were born again to treat your feelings with that same contempt and perpetuate this glorious tradition of spiritual champions by clinging to the belief that God is on your side and loves you passionately, despite everything within you screaming the opposite.
You weren’t born to be a groveling, shame-faced feeling-junkie. Cut the umbilical cord tethering you to spiritual babyhood and soar with spiritual giants to the realm of faith. You can do it! It’s a promise from God himself.
© Copyright 2006, Grantley Morris. May be freely copied in whole or in part provided: it is not altered
