You Make Me Feel ...

I know a guy who is really mad at God. He has looked around at other believers and found that they appear to have a genuine relationship with God. They know God loves them. They know He is part of their life. He doesn't. He doesn't sense it. He doesn't get a warm feeling from God. So he's ... miffed. My friend is probably not rare. I'd suspect there are more than a few that feel that way to some degree or another.

It's a puzzling dilemma. We believers have God's Word that guarantees us that "God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom 5:8). How could He say it any more clearly? "While we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son" (Rom 5:10). One of our best known verses says, "God loved the world in this way; He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life" (John 3:16). "Does God love me?" Every last believer can say with absolute, complete, total certainty, "Yes! Beyond all doubt!" And, yet, more than a few struggle with it. Why? Because ... we don't feel it. So why is it that we think we can determine "truth" by "feeling it"?

We have a common expression. "You make me feel ..." We might say it a variety of ways. "You make me so mad!" "You make me happy." But what we are saying is that another person is making us ... feel. And that's not -- quite -- accurate. No one reaches into the emotional centers of your being and makes you feel. So how does it work? How do you know, for instance, that your parents or your spouse or a close friend loves you? Because you feel it? Maybe, but it's not because they make you feel it. It's because you are aware of the things they do, the things they say, the nuances and overt actions and all that summed together and it speaks "love" to you. You can see it, so you can feel it. If that's so, why doesn't that carry over to our relationship with God? He sent His Son. He pours out blessings on us. He gives grace -- favor we never earned. He gives us mercy -- protection from the punishment we have certainly earned. He gives us gifts, adopts us into His family, takes our sin and substitutes Christ's righteousness, meets our every need, sustains us day by day ... on and on and on. But we can't see it. No one does more for us that screams "I love you!" and still we question, "Does God really love me?" It isn't a shortcoming on God's part, you see. It's that we don't recognize it, so we don't feel it. The problem isn't on His end; it's on ours.