A faithful member of the Church wrote this: "There is something that troubles me. I'm not as close to God as I would like to be. I read my Bible a great deal and pray, and try to do all I can to live right. Because of long illness I'm not able to go to church. Perhaps I depend too much on feeling."
Let us thank God that He makes us conscious of our need of further growth in grace. I feel sorry for those who lack that consciousness. They are on dangerous ground. There is no state so dangerous as that of being satisfied with one's spiritual condition. Our God, who is infinitely resourceful, employs many ways to bring to our spiritually dim minds this realization of need for a higher level of Christian experience. The very fact that He thus troubles us is the strongest evidence that He is seeking to work out a plan for our lives and that He considers us infinitely worth saving. It is in this context that we ought to view the matter. Thus we can receive from the troublings of our spirit new hope, new assurance, that God is with us, and that heaven is our grand destination.
You say, "Perhaps I depend too much on feeling." There is no greater mistake that a Christian can make than to equate high spiritual attainment with high and joyous feeling. Let us never forget that there is a mysterious interlocking of body and spirit. They react upon each other. When afflictions are acute, when life's woes pour in upon us in floodtide, there comes in varying degree a temptation to doubt the genuineness of our religious experience. Some meet this temptation with essentially the words of Job: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." Some, at the other end of the scale, actually become more or less despondent. The remainder experience varying degrees of spiritual blurring until the affliction be past.
I repeat, no greater mistake could be made than to measure the genuineness and worth of our religious beliefs and Christian experience by the subjective yardstick of our feelings. Some people are born with abounding health, both of body and mind, and with a personality that seems to be a joyous blend of the leasttainted genes transmitted from our Edenic parents. When such people take hold of Christ and His salvation, they find that life reaches its maximum and that every day that follows is a day of light. Even if they are not always on the highest mountaintop, they are rarely, if ever, down in a dark valley.
Such people have probably never taken time to analyze their state. If they did they would realize that their perennially elevated spirits rest on two pillars, one physical and earthly, the other spiritual and heavenly. The danger for them is that if the first pillar is suddenly undermined by sickness or some other great adversity, they are likely to lose their sense of spiritual balance. They are tempted to doubt the reality of the second pillar.
On the other hand, those who have never been able to rest their weight upon a pillar of abounding physical vitality, and who seem to have been born to adversity, do not necessarily find in calamity a temptation to doubt the reality of the Christian faith that they have believed and practiced. That is one of the few compensations that the chronically afflicted can have.
Evidently, my dear sister, your affliction, though now long standing, came upon you in later years. You earlier had bright decades, joyous, bubbling hours when the skies were promisingly blue and the songs of the birds seemed always harmonious. Yours is the experience of many, for only a minority stand at one or the other extreme that I have just described. You are one of a multitude of God's elect who have watched one of the two supporting pillars of joyous life crumble, and you are tempted to think that with everything resting on one lone pillar you are in a precarious position. Indeed, when the winds of adversity blow wildly you may imagine that the pillar sways with the tempest, and may even collapse. If you are like many, you may find that the black clouds of affliction so completely hide the foundations of your faith that you are tempted to feel that no pillar exists.
At the very outset you have this significant fact to give you pause amid such troublings of spirit. Countless good men and women before you have experienced the same trials of their faith and have come through their afflictions with a better faith than they had ever known in the past. And what was the secret of this triumph of faith over adversity? The answer is ready: They had grasped firmly this prime truth, that their surety of salvation rests upon a sublime fact, not upon sublime feelings.
Let us never forget, in days of joy or hours of grief, that our hope of deliverance from a world of sorrow, sickness, and death rests on the fact that God was manifest in the flesh, that He lived here a sinless life, that He died for our sins, that He rose triumphant from the grave, that He ascended to the right hand of the Father to make intercession for us, and that He will come the second time without sin unto salvation to take us to Himself. No link in this divine chain depends for its strength upon our feelings. When God set the vast plan of salvation in motion He foresaw the victorious end of that plan a great company of the redeemed from among men.
The whole of Christ's earthly life, till His ascension, was open for all to see. A great cloud of witnesses could testify to the truth of His claim that He was the Son of God. The disciples went forth, not as preachers of abstract moralizings and ethereal ethics, but as witnesses to the great fact that there had lived on earth One who was morality incarnate, the embodiment of ethics, who was indeed the Way, the Truth, and the Life. They were witnesses to the fact that Christ, by His words and deeds, had fulfilled the forecasts of Moses and the prophets that a divine Deliverer would come. They were witnesses to the fact that Christ possessed power to forgive sin, the cause of all woe. Finally, they were witnesses to the fact that Christ, who had staked His breath-taking claims on His power to rise from the dead, had, indeed, risen. They had seen Him after His resurrection, they were eyewitnesses. They had "heard" Him, they had "handled" Him (1 John 1:1).
No wonder they could sing at midnight in prison, after having suffered most painful beatings. Their confidence in a divine fact, or series of facts, was so great that they could rise above feelings. Why be depressed at the thought of further troubles, even at the prospect of martyrdom? They had a holy contempt of death. They were sure that Christ had broken the bands of death, and they remembered His words: "Because I live, ye shall live also" (John 14:19).
Absolute certainty that they had "not followed cunningly devised fables" marked the faith and the preaching of the apostles (2 Peter 1:16). Paul in the dungeon, awaiting execution, gave typical expression to this certainty when he wrote: "I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day" (2 Tim. 1:12).
Let us thank God anew that our hope of life everlasting, our assurance of the reality and truth of our holy religion, rests not upon so unstable a thing as feelings, which may rise and fall with our blood pressure, the fluctuating tone of our digestive tract, or the variable functioning of our endocrine glands. Not until the day that these vile bodies of ours are changed like unto Christ's glorious body, will feeling consistently blend with divine fact to testify to the surety of our salvation. Until that day we have the fact that God was manifest in the flesh for our salvation, a fact more surely established than that Julius Caesar or Charlemagne lived. It is our privilege to say with Paul, "I know whom I have believed." And knowing that, we can face the darkest hour, the most tormenting affliction, with inner calm and peace. We can even make them serve their divinely appointed purpose the further preparation of our lives "against that day," the great day of our deliverance.
The answer is given under the supervision of the Editor. This specific answer was taken from the book Questions People Have Asked Me, pp. 173-177 by Francis D. Nichol.
