Christians expect to have an experience of the Presence of the Holy Spirit. This is both good and right for the Lord is an active Person in our lives. Yet, there is real danger in defining our discipleship around ‘spiritual experience.’ Seeking an experience can set us up for manipulation by unscrupulous leaders who play on our emotions. If some subjective experience defines faith, we may well despair of real transformation when we fail to feel the right mix of emotions.
When I was a teen-age Christian, full of earnest desire to become a true follower of Christ, I attended meetings that offered me an experience. At the end of a stirring talk, we gathered “around the altar” at the front of the church where loud prayers and songs opened our hearts. A particularly effective means of touching our hearts was the ‘testimony,’ the personal story of someone whose exciting experience of God’s power was held up for us to emulate. The weakness of the system was demonstrated by the fact that 99% of us who made genuine commitments during those moments of ‘spiritual experience,’ found our resolve to live holy lives waning before the dawning of the next day! It’s not that ‘altar’ experience was useless. It was incomplete. We needed to be taught and encouraged in the spiritual disciplines - things such as regular worship, generous giving of time and resources, study, service, living in community, meditation, and contemplative prayer – that allowed God’s Spirit to make us into true saints on Monday morning at school and work whose actions matched our altar aspirations. It wasn’t nearly as exciting to faithfully commit to discipline as it was to stand with friends in the holy huddle in the highly charged atmosphere of the ‘altar service.’
Many who would follow Jesus as adults are, in fact, chasing a ‘spiritual experience.’ They want Jesus to give them good vibes in their soul, but they don’t want to practice the disciplines that are absolutely required of those who would become mature, productive, and fruitful disciples. The Bible is clear that an emotion based Christianity will make us "infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming." (Ephesians 4:14, NIV)
Paul expressed the kind of rock solid faith that will keep us when spiritually dry times overtake us, when experience fails us. He said, "I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day." (2 Timothy 1:12, NIV) "For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 8:38-39, NIV) He did not trust his fickle feelings, nor did he chase good vibrations! His hope rested fully in Christ Jesus.
I pray that you will commit to faithful disciplines that open your mind and heart to the transforming work of the Spirit. Build your hope of eternal life, yes, and a rich and full life here, not on some spiritual experience, but on the Truth of Christ Jesus.
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My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus' blood and righteousness.
I dare not trust the sweetest frame,
But wholly lean on Jesus' name.
When darkness seems to hide His face,
I rest on His unchanging grace.
In every high and stormy gale,
My anchor holds within the veil.
His oath, His covenant, His blood,
Support me in the whelming flood.
When all around my soul gives way,
He then is all my Hope and Stay.
When He shall come with trumpet sound,
O may I then in Him be found!
Dressed in His righteousness alone,
Faultless to stand before the throne!
On Christ the solid Rock I stand,
All other ground is sinking sand.
All other ground is sinking sand.
The Solid Rock
Mote, Edward / Bradbury, William B.
© Public Domain
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