Soon after I stopped feeling this intense love and presence of God, I started grasping for things that normally brought that passion back. I would drive almost an hour away to find churches with great worship bands and speakers……I knew on some level that there was something off about the way I was approaching this, but I felt like I needed to do whatever it took to get that feeling back. And then one day it struck me: my faith had stopped being about God and had become about how I felt. That was really selfish of me. It shouldn't have mattered how I felt if I trusted that God was real. At that point the best thing for someone like me was to remove those feelings so that my faith would once again become about God, not myself. ….the end result was that I began learning how to center my life around God with or without the feelings that I once had…….To make Christianity purely about feelings is to make it about ourselves rather than God. God doesn't promise to constantly flood us with intense emotion…From the earliest days of the church, Christians have based their closeness to God on theology - on what they knew about God from Scripture - rather than feelings. Many of the first Christians shed blood for believing in God. If anyone had the right to feel distant from God, wouldn’t it be the people suffering for his sake? Instead, the early disciples rejoiced at the chance to suffer for Christ (Acts 5:41)."
From the book: Short Answers to Big Questions about God, the Bible and Christianity
by Clinton E. Arnold and Jeff Arnold
