“Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Praise the Lord!” – Psalm 150:6
I am going to be transparent right now. I am in the midst of a Psalm 22 time in my life. If you haven’t read Psalm 22 recently, go read it. David is watching his kingdom totter. He is feeling the pressure of being a leader that cannot right the ship. He is feeling the weight of his own sinful decisions and is lamenting the feeling that God has abandoned him. While I am not ruling a nation, I am also dealing with feelings of inadequacy and incompetence. I am in a season of frustration. I feel like my prayers aren’t going any higher than the ceiling. I feel the temptations and enticements of habits that I laid down years ago. I desperately want to feel closer to God, but I also feel like my motivation to do the things necessary to accomplish that has departed.
To make matters worse, this is all happening during our church’s “21 Days of Purpose”! We do this time of prayer and fasting every January, and it is usually a launchpad for the rest of the year. I feel like attacks always come during the 21 days, but not like this. This doesn’t feel like an attack, but rather an apathy that my own flesh is creating. The enemy of our soul isn’t our only adversary. Our flesh battles us daily as well.
So why am I choosing right now to publish a blog? I certainly am not feeling overly spiritual. If anything, I feel like not reading the Word, not praying, and not even going to church at all. I am writing now because my “feelings” are not significant. Do they exist? Sure. But feelings are so fickle. They will change from one moment to the next. Being led around by how I feel will produce nothing but superficial and surface experiences in my life. God has given me a good mind and a strong sense of morality. There are certain things that must happen whether I feel like making those things happen or not. I never wake up in the morning excited to go to work. I don’t hate my job at all, but there are many things I could be doing that I would enjoy WAY more. That said, I still go to work every day. Providing for my family and showing my children what a good work ethic looks like is important to me. I keep up on the laundry in our house. I rarely feel like doing laundry, but it needs to be done and I have the time, so I do it. I most certainly don’t feel like paying bills. Ever. However, to keep the lights and heat on, I pay the bills.
I was sitting in our prayer meeting last week, and I was just letting the service wash over me without paying too much attention. Suddenly I had a very sobering thought: “Who do you think you are?” I knew that thought didn’t come from me because I wasn’t thinking spiritual thoughts at the time. I was probably daydreaming about an upcoming trip. That thought really jolted me out of my stupor, however. I didn’t hear any heavenly voice, but I felt strongly in my spirit that God was asking this question to me directly. I started taking a mental inventory, looking for any ways that I may have become arrogant or unthankful. I was feeling anything BUT arrogant. But the more that I thought about it, the more it became clear that my apathy and “feelings” were hindering the only thing I was really created to do: glorify God. I was not giving glory to my Creator.
How is God’s worthiness of praise and glory in any way affected by my frustration? It isn’t. He is holy. He is perfect. He is unsearchable. He is good. He is worthy. Me withholding my praise to God because I don’t feel like it is not only immature and bratty, but it is dangerous. God will be glorified. That much is assured. Luke 19:40 reads “But He answered and said to them, ‘I tell you that if these should keep silent, the stones would immediately cry out’.” The universe itself would cry out to God if we didn’t. I don’t ever want anyone or anything to be a replacement for me. He is worthy of all praise! No matter how we feel, we must do what we were created to do!
Our feelings are temporal, flighty, and frankly unreliable. When our feelings start to seem more important that our basic Christian responsibilities, we need to ask ourselves the question: Who do we think we are?