When God Seems Far Away – Causes (part 2)

 

In my last post, I shared a bit about what it’s like when God seems far away, and why silence feels so uncomfortable.  So let’s keep this topic going and address some of the potential causes for this feeling of distance.

1.  1.  Physical and Emotional reasons

The first thing you should take a look at when you are trying to figure out why God seems distant is your physical and emotional health.

Poor physical or mental health can take all our focus and energy and, at times, get in the way of our relationship with God.  Physical factors such as illness, fatigue, or just being in general poor health can make us sluggish and unmotivated, and can contribute to our feeling of distance.

Emotional factors like stress, loss, bereavement, worry, or some type of diagnosed mental condition (depression, anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, etc) can definitely skew your view of reality and make it very difficult to feel God’s presence.

Another emotional factor has to do with your ability to feel feelings.  Perhaps you’re primarily a person of action and reason, and feelings seem to just get in your way. Or you’ve experienced so much pain and disappointment in life that you’ve shut down your emotional system. In either case, if you’re emotionally detached it is very, very difficult to feel close to God and enjoy that relationship.

2.  Deception by Satan

Feeling cut off from God is sometimes nothing but a clever illusion that Satan – the deceiver – throws our way.   When you give your life to Christ, you gain the most wonderful and most powerful Friend in the entire universe. You also gain, however, a fearsome enemy.

Any friend of God’s is an enemy of the devil.

There is a spiritual battle going on all the time, all around you.  Sometimes we forget that Satan is continually poking at your weak spots, trying to wear you down and make you doubt.

Satan is nothing compared to God – not as smart, not as powerful; plus we already know he loses in the end. He is, nevertheless, superhumanly powerful, evil and cunning.

With God on your side you have at your disposal what it takes to defeat Satan every time, and the devil knows this. All he can do to Christians is to fool them into thinking they’ve been cut off from God and His power.   So he will do all he can to make you doubt God’s power and reality in your life by trying to manipulate your feelings.  And he’s really good at it.

   3. Communication has Broken Down

For good communication to happen, you have to have an understandable message, someone to hear that message, and someone to provide that message.

Keeping a relationship alive involves effort and time.  It is very easy to find ourselves all of a sudden out of the habit of doing our part to keep our relationship with God thriving.  When communication breaks down, relationships suffer.

How do we communicate with God?  Here are the most obvious ways:  We Listen to God when we read and meditate on His word, and we speak to God when we pray.

Relationships are either growing or dying.  They don’t remain static.  If you are not putting effort into being both a listener and a speaker, if you are not consistently spending time focusing on this relationship, then communication breaks down on some level.  And that relationship will certainly suffer.

It’s not rocket science; but it takes effort.

4. We Like the Distance

If we’re honest, some of us would have to admit that we don’t WANT God to get too close.  Because that would mean we’d have to change some things about our lives.

Most of us spend our lives pursuing our dreams, our ambitions, perhaps never giving God much of a thought during it all.  You have your church life, and you have your “normal” life, and you might not want to have God intrude too much into your Monday through Saturday world.  We seem to be afraid that if we let Him into the picture, we might discover that our dreams and ambitions are trivial, or self-serving, or even hurtful to others, and we might have to change those plans.

Which we don’t really want to do.

Do you remember the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden?  They were happy and content and in relationship with God – they WALKED with Him for goodness sakes!.  But then they started pursuing their own ambitions, which they knew were contrary to what God wanted, and they wound up hiding in the bushes hoping God wouldn’t find them.

We hide from God behind our modern equivalents of leaves and bushes.

Next time you think God is far away, he honest and ask yourself if distance might have been what you really had in mind somewhere along the way when you chose the path you are on.

  5. We Forget Who We Are

Here’s another reason why God may seem far off: sometimes we forget who we really are.

I like movies about animals, and there is one in particular called “Milo and Otis.” Milo the cat and Otis the dog become good friends and are off on a wonderful adventure together.

There is a scene at the beginning of the movie when Milo and Otis first meet. Milo, the cat, says to Otis, the dog, “You certainly are a funny-looking cat. Just what sort of a cat are you?”

And Otis, the dog, replies, “I’m not a cat. I’m a dog.”

Milo says, “Well, of course, but deep down everyone is really a cat, aren’t they?”

And Otis says, “No. Deep down I’m a dog.”

Otis had a strong sense of identity. But sometimes we human beings lose our identity. We think, theologically speaking, that deep down we are absolutely NOTHING but sinners.  That deep down there’s something inherently wrong with us. And we Christian brothers and sisters help drive that idea home because we are so fond of reminding everybody how broken and imperfect they are.    I’m so painfully aware of my own shortcomings that I can’t stand the thought that you might not be aware of yours.  So I’ll point them out to you!  It is true enough, of course: we all HAVE sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  But there’s more to it than that.

Sin is only the mask we wear. If we could take off all the masks of pride and self-righteousness and vanity and greed, what would be left is God’s image. Deep down we are the very image of God. Human beings are creatures who wear God’s face, and then cover it up with these ungodly masks.

Sometimes we are far off from God because we have forgotten who we are.

Sometimes we also forget where we’re going.  Have you ever heard of Douglas Corrigan? He was a famous aviator. I’ll bet you have heard of him, just not by that name. On the morning of July 17, 1938 Douglas Corrigan climbed into a flimsy Curtiss Robin biplane, and took off from an airfield in New York to fly solo and non-stop across the country. He planned to land in Los Angeles the next day. Other pilots had flown non-stop from New York to Los Angeles, but it was still enough of a novelty that the press turned out to see him take off and take pictures and put him on the front page of the newspaper.

The next day he landed at a grassy airstrip in Ireland. The newspapers immediately dubbed him “Wrong Way Corrigan.”

Sometimes we’re like Wrong Way Corrigan. We say we want to go to California, but we head for Ireland.   We claim we want to be close to God, but our choices and confusion land us in the wilderness instead.

6. Sin Separates us from God 

This isn’t something we particularly like to think about, but our sin can create distance between us and God.  It may be sin we are aware of, or it may be sin we’re not even conscious of.

Isaiah 59:1-2    “Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear.  But your iniquities have separated you from your God; our sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.”

Whenever God seems distant, maybe we should pray what King David wrote in Psalm 139:23-24:

“Search me, O God, and know my heart . . . See if there be any offensive way in me.”

Many of us–no, all of us–choose at times to stiff-arm God and His ways. Compared to other people, certainly compared to a serial killer, we might not think we’re all that bad. But in the raw honesty of our own hearts, if we were to face God, it would be with the knowledge of all our sin.  We can – by our lives and actions – distance ourselves from God. We have often lived like we could run our lives just fine without Him.  He can have control of my “church life”; I’ll keep control of my “Monday through Saturday life”.

Bottom line is that our sin separates us from God.  We do ourselves a favor by asking God to reveal our sins to us so we can do something about them.

  7. We Can’t be Still

C.S. Lewis wrote, “My pain screams so loudly I can’t hear God’s whispers.”

We’re often so busy being miserable and running from problem to problem that we can’t be still long enough to acknowledge God’s presence. We are like a fussy baby, who badly needs a nap. We cannot relax enough to hear the comforting whisper of our Father because we’re so busy fussing about how awful everything is.

There is rest in His arms but we’re too busy being miserable to find it.

 

    8.  Unrealistic Expectations of God

A man who had never in his life seen the ocean was disappointed when he finally saw it.

“I thought it would look bigger,” he complained.

There is always more to God than we can see.

Do we really expect God to show Himself to us in all his glory and perhaps burn our eyes out when he appears to us, burst our eardrums when he speaks, crush us to dust when he touches? The glory of God is too much for our human bodies to experience.  So why should anyone be shocked if he chooses to be just a little gentler or quieter than we expected him to be?

You were literally made for God. It shouldn’t have to be an extreme emotional encounter – something to fry your brains or drain you of adrenaline – to relate to the God who made you. Perhaps relating to God should be as simple as breathing, as natural as a child chatting to its mother? You don’t have to wait until something is spooky or spectacular before concluding that God is in it.

To the Jews, Jesus seemed too ordinary to be their Messiah. But he WAS the Messiah.  Could you be making a similar mistake in your expectations of what it would be like to have God in your life?

9. We Choose to Focus on FEELING Instead of FACT

I think this is really the key because our feelings FEEL so much stronger than the facts that we know in our heads.  Think about this for a minute.

We want to FEEL something a certain way before we’ll believe that it’s REAL.

True faith comes from acting on what we KNOW regardless of how we feel.

It’s possible to go to bed feeling contented, on top of the world, and yet wake up the next day with a heavy cloud of gloom hanging over your head. And for whatever reason, that bad mood stays with you all day long. You don’t know where it came from but it’s just there, and it won’t go away.

Now, you may say you don’t live by your feelings but in a very real sense you do. For instance, you might not be able to shake off some harsh words someone spoke to you a few days ago. Or, you may constantly battle feelings of rejection or unworthiness. Without question, these feelings have a direct impact on the way you live.

Can you believe in something you can’t see or touch?

Of course, you can. You do it all the time.

Raise your hand if you believe Abraham Lincoln existed. How do you FEEL about whether or not Lincoln existed?  And does it really MATTER how you feel about it?  Does that change the reality?  You have never seen or touched him. You simply believe in the integrity of people who claim to have researched the evidence that he existed. You believe such things, even though the people who say he existed are quite capable of lying.

We could say the same about scientific discoveries. Scientists do not squander their lives trying to replicate everyone else’s experiments. It would take them thousands of lifetimes to personally confirm every scientific fact they believe and count on to be true. They simply trust the integrity of their fellow, fallible scientists and build on that foundation to make new discoveries.

It is impossible to function in society without trusting human testimony.

“The bread was baked fresh today”.  Did you see the baker in action?  Probably not, but  you believe the store employee who shares that information with you.

“Welcome on board flight 1425 to Dublin!”  How do you know that the plane is really going to Dublin and that Dublin really exists?  You believe the people or the data that told you those things.

You put your faith in the testimony of others hundreds of times each day.

Now think about this – The entire universe teeters on the dependability of God.

Every time you do anything, you are unconsciously trusting the integrity of God.

When you sit on a chair, for instance, you are trusting that God won’t suddenly change the laws of physics and let you crash to the floor or fly up to the ceiling. Christian faith is taking the faith we all have in the Creator’s dependability and simply extending that faith to include what he has put in black and white. Bible faith is just taking God at his word.

It is choosing to believe that what God says is true, whether it feels like it or not

We also put our faith in Experts every day:

A scientist says earth hurls through space (moves around the sun) at 67,000 miles per hour, while spinning on its axis at 1000 miles per hour; to you it seems motionless.

A little aside here.  Gravity and the speed at which the earth move always makes me think a bit.  Even though the earth we are on is spinning at 1000 miles per hour, if you jump in the air, you’ll come down and land in the same place. Why didn’t some of the earth move past you if you were up in the air for a second?

And another thing:  If a plane travels in the same direction that the earth is spinning at 500 miles per hour, why doesn’t the plane go 1500 miles per hour, or does it? Or, if the plane goes in the opposite direction of the earth’s rotation, why doesn’t the plane go backwards 500 miles per hour? Or, if you hovered in a helicopter, why doesn’t the earth disappear beneath you at 1000 miles per hour?  Just because it FEELS to me like those things should be true, doesn’t make them true.

I know that Einstein had an explanation, but my non-physics-expert mind just ponders these things and marvels at the God who created our earth and all its wonder.  I trust His integrity.  It all works together perfectly.  I don’t require all the facts to accept gravity.

But back to our scientific experts’ observations:

• A doctor says you have glaucoma, and without surgery you will lose your vision; to you your eyes feel just fine.  Will you choose to have the surgery?
• An electrician says a wire is dangerously live; to you it looks harmless.  Will you touch it, just to see??
• A mechanic says your car needs oil immediately; you don’t think it’s necessary.  Will you keep driving it, since it seems fine?

Who should you believe: your feelings about these things, or those who know more than you?

Humor me for a minute.  We’re going to tell time using only our feelings.  Now don’t look at the clock or your watch.  Are you feeling hungry?  If so, it must be about noon.  Are you feeling full and sleepy?  Then it must be 3:00 PM.  Or maybe 10:00 PM.  You decide.  How light is it?  Well, it’s hard to tell in here, so just tell me how light you feel it is.

OK, we can all see how silly it is to try and tell what time it is by how we feel…

It’s crudely inaccurate compared to using an objective measure like a clock. Likewise, guessing from circumstances or whether we feel guilty or happy or peaceful or excited or lucky, is an incredibly unreliable way of gauging spiritual reality.

The more important something is, the more critical it is that we stop trusting our feelings and start relying on an objective measure. What if an airline pilot ignored the plane’s instrumentation and decided to fly by his gut feeling?  “I know my instruments say to put the landing gear down now, but I just don’t feel that we’ll be landing all that soon.  It feels like we’re pretty high up still.”  Flying a plane based on fact and reliable instrumentation is critically important.  And spiritual matters are literally more important than life and death. All of eternity hinges on them. The stakes are far too high to dare rely on your feelings or circumstances to guess spiritual reality.

“Do not rely on your own understanding”, warns Scripture (Proverbs 3:5).

“There is a way that seems right but it leads to death”, screams another verse (Proverbs 14:12).

You need the precision of God’s Word.

Each revelation of Scripture is like a dial in a pilot’s cockpit. Give more credence to your gut feeling than to one of them, and your spiritual life is on the line. You’re gonna crash.

Your faith must be in the bedrock of the Word of God, not the shifting sands of feelings.

Emotions fluctuate wildly. God’s word is solid.

So, Who should you believe: your senses, or the expert?

• Jesus says “if anyone loves me . . . my Father will love him and we will make our home with him” (John 14:23);   but….  you feel empty.
• God says” how often I would have gathered your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings” (Matthew 23:37);    but…  you feel God is uncaring.
• God says “nothing can separate you from the love of God” (Romans 8:35-39);   but…  you feel some terrible tragedy in your life proves God no longer loves you.  Or doesn’t exist.
• God says “rejoice in the Lord always” (Philippians 4:4);   but…. you feel there’s nothing to rejoice about.
• God says not to be surprised “at the painful triasl you are suffering” (1 Peter 4:12), that we “must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom” (Acts 14:22);    but…  you feel surprised and confused when bad things happen.
• God says, he was bruised and wounded for you (Isaiah 53:5); but…   you wonder if he loves you.

Don’t forget how easily your feelings and emotions can be influenced to change.  It doesn’t make good sense to make your decisions about God based on the presence, or lack, of certain feelings.

That’s enough about what might cause feelings of distance from God for now.  Let’s focus, next time, on what purpose these desert times could possibly serve.

See you next time!